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LETTERS 



DE QUINCE Y, 



THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, 



TO A YOUNG MAN WHOSE EDUCATION 
HAS BEEN NEGLECTED. 



^ 






PHILADELPHIA. 
JOHN P E N I N G T O iY 

169 CHESTNUT STREET. 
1843. 






C. Sherman, Printer, 

19 St. James Street 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. 

The Quarterly Review, notoriously chary of its 
praise when in political opposition, after a copious 
extract from the English Opium-Eater's recent no- 
tice of Shakspeare,* exclaims, " Who, after read- 
ing such passages as these, does not regret that 
the author has written so little V This sentiment 
will be emphatically echoed by those readers of the 
following letters who can appreciate the depth of 
thought they evolve, the peculiar raciness of the 
style, and who can sympathize with their writer 
in his enthusiastic love of learning. 

They originally appeared in the London Maga- 
zine for 1823, when English magazine literature 
was in its zenith. Among the writers whose con- 
tributions at this period placed and maintained the 

* in the Encyclopaedia Bntannica, 7th edit. 



London in the front rank of British periodicals 
were Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey, " the Eng- 
lish Opium-Eater." The productions of the first 
two have all, it is believed, appeared in separate 
forms, but only a portion of those of the latter. 
This hiatus it is the object of the present and of a 
future publication to fill up. 

Indocti discant should form the epigraphe to 
" Letters to a Young- Man whose Education has 
been Neglected ;" but men of mature age and 
scholarship will feel in the following pages the 
necessity of preserving in its integrity the oft 
quoted line — 

Indocti discant, et ament meminisse periti. 

November, 1842. 



LETTERS 



A YOUNG MAN, ETC. ETC. 



LETTER I. 

My Dear Sir, 

When I had the pleasure of meeting you 

at Ch , for the second time in my life, 

I was much concerned to remark the general 
dejection of your manner. I may now add, 
that I was also much surprised ; your cousin's 
visit to me, having made it no longer a point 
of delicacy to suppress that feeling. Ceneral 
report had represented you as in possession of 
all which enters into the worldly estimate of 
happiness, — great opulence, unclouded reputa- 
tion, and freedom from unhappy connexions. 
That you had the priceless blessing of unfluc- 
tuating health, I know upon your own autho- 
2 



14 MYSTERY SOLVED CHARACTERISTICALLY. 

rity. And the concurring opinions of your 
friends, together with my own opportunities 
for observation, left me no room to doubt that 
you wanted not the last and mightiest among 
the sources of happiness — a fortunate constitu- 
tion of mind, both for moral and intellectual 
ends. So many blessings as these, meeting 
in the person of one man, and yet all in some 
mysterious way defeated and poisoned, pre- 
sented a problem too interesting both to the 
selfish and the generous curiosity of men- — to 
make it at all wonderful, that at that time and 
place you should have been the subject of 
much discussion. Now and then some solu- 
tions of the mystery were hazarded : in parti- 
cular I remember one from a young lady of 
seventeen, who said with a positive air, " That 

Mr. M \s dejection was well known to 

arise from an unfortunate attachment in early 
life," which assurance appeared to have great 
weight with some other young ladies of six- 
teen. But upon the whole, I think that no 
account of the matter was proposed at that 
time which satisfied myself, or was likely to 
satisfy any reflecting person. 



MYSTERY CLEARED UP. 15 

At length the visit of your cousin L in 

his road to Th has cleared up the mystery 

in a way more agreeable to myself than I could 
have ventured to anticipate from any commu- 
nication short of that which should acquaint 
me with the entire dispersion of the dejection 
under which you laboured. I allow myself to 
call such a disclosure agreeable, partly upon 
the ground that where the grief or dejection of 
our friends admits of no important alleviation, 
it is yet satisfactory to know, that it may be 
traced to causes of adequate dignity : and, in 
this particular case, I have not only that 
assurance, but the prospect of contributing 
some assistance to your emancipation from 
these depressing recollections by co-operating 
with your own efforts in the way you have 
pointed out for supplying the defects of your 
early education. 

L explained to me all that your own 

letter had left imperfect ; in particular how it 
was that you came to be defrauded of the edu- 
cation to which even your earliest and hum- 
blest prospects had entitled you : by what 
heroic efforts, but how vainly, you laboured to 



16 RESIDENCE AT A UNIVERSITY. 

repair that greatest of losses : what remarkable 
events concurred to raise you to your pre- 
sent state of prosperity ; and all other circum- 
stances which appeared necessary to put me 
fully in possession of your present wishes and 
intentions. 

The two questions, which you addressed to 
me through him, I have answered below : 
these were questions which I could answer 
easily and without meditation : but for the 
main subject of our future correspondence, it 
is so weighty, and demands such close atten- 
tion (as even i" find, who have revolved the 
principal points almost daily for many years), 
that I would willingly keep it wholly distinct 
from the hasty letter which I am now obliged 
to write ; on which account it is that I shall 
forbear to enter at present upon the series of 
letters which I have promised, even if I should 
find that my time were not exhausted by the 
answers to your two questions below. 

To your first question, — whether to you, 
with your purposes and at your age of thirty- 
two, a residence at either of our English 
universities — or at any foreign university, can 



LECTURES. 



be of much service? — my answer is firmly 
and unhesitatingly — no. The majority of the 
under-graduates of your own standing in an 
academic sense will be your juniors by twelve 
or fourteen years; a disparity of age which 
could not but make your society mutually 
burthensome. What then is it, that you would 
seek in a university ? Lectures 1 These, whe- 
ther public or private, are surely the very 
worst modes of acquiring any sort of accurate 
knowledge ; and are just as much inferior to a 
good book on the same subject, as that book 
hastily read aloud, and then immediately with- 
drawn, would be inferior to the same book left 
in your possession, and open at any hour to 
be consulted, retraced, collated, and in the 
fullest sense studied. But, besides this, uni- 
versity lectures are naturally adapted not so 
much to the general purpose of communicating 
knowledge, as to the specific purpose of meeting 
a particular form of examination for degrees, 
and a particular profession to which the whole 
course of the education is known to be directed. 
The two single advantages which lectures can 

ever acquire to balance those which they 

2# 



18 LIBRARIES. 

forego — are either, first, the obvious one of a 
better apparatus for displaying illustrative ex- 
periments than most students can command ; 
and the cases where this becomes of impor- 
tance it cannot be necessary to mention : 
second, the advantage of a rhetorical delivery, 
when that is of any use (as in lectures on 
poetry, &c.) These, however, are advantages 
more easily commanded in a great capital than 
in the most splendid university. What then 
remains to a university, except its libraries? 
And with regard to those the answer is 
short : to the greatest of them under-graduates 
have not free access : to the inferior ones 
(of their own college, &c.) the libraries of the 
great capitals are often equal or superior : and 
for mere purposes of study your own private 
library is far preferable to the Bodleian or the 
Vatican. To you, therefore, a university can 
offer no attraction except on the assumption 
that you see cause to adopt a profession : and, 
as a degree from some university would in that 
case be useful (and indispensable, except for 
the bar), your determination on this first ques- 
tion must still be dependent on that which you 
form upon the second. 



AUTHORSHIP. 19 

In this second question you call for my 
opinion upon the 11th chapter of Mr. Cole- 
ridge's Biographia Literaria, as applied to the 
circumstances in which you yourself are placed. 
This chapter, to express its substance in the 
most general terms, is a dissuasion from what 
Herder, in a passage there quoted, calls " Die 
Authorschaft ;" or, as Mr. Coleridge expresses 
it, " the trade of authorship :" and the amount 
of the advice is — that, for the sake of his own 
happiness and respectability, every man should 
adopt some trade or profession — and should 
make literature a subordinate pursuit. On this 
advice, I understand you to ask, first, whether 
it is naturally to be interpreted, as extending to 
cases such as yours ; and second, if so, what is 
my judgment on such advice so extended 1 As 
to my judgment upon this advice, supposing it 
addressed to men of your age and situation, 
you will easily collect from all which I shall 
say — that I think it as bad as can well be 
given. 

Waiving this, however, and to consider your 
other question — in what sense, and with what 
restrictions the whole chapter is to be inter- 



20 AUTHORSHIP. 

preted ; that is a point which I find it no easy 
matter to settle. Mr. Coleridge, who does not 
usually offend by laxity and indecision of pur- 
pose, has in this instance allowed the very 
objects of his advice to shift and fluctuate 
before him ; and from the beginning to the 
end, nothing is firmly constructed for the 
apprehension to grasp, nor are the grounds of 
judgment steadily maintained. From the title 
of the chapter (an affectionate exhortation to 
those who in early life feel themselves disposed 
to become authors), and from the express 
words of Herder, in the passage cited from 
him as the final words of the chapter, which 
words discountenance " authorship" only as 
" zu fruh oder unmassig gebraucht" (practised 
too early, or with too little temperance), it 
would have been a natural presumption that 
Mr. Coleridge's counsels regarded chiefly or 
altogether the case of very youthful authors, 
and the unfortunate thirst for premature dis- 
tinction. And if this had been the purpose of 
the chapter, excepting that the evil involved in 
such a case is not very great, and is generally 



COLERIDGE. 21 

intercepted by the difficulties which prevent 
and over-punished by the mortifications which 
attend, any such juvenile acts of presumption, 
there could have been no room for differing 
with Mr. Coleridge, except upon the propriety 
of occupying his great powers with topics of 
such trivial interest. But this, though from 
the title it naturally should have been, is not 
the evil, or any part of it, which Mr. Coleridge 
is contemplating. What Mr. Coleridge really 
has in his view are two most different objec- 
tions to literature, as the principal pursuit of 
life; which, as I have said, continually alternate 
with each other as the objects of his arguments, 
and sometimes become perplexed together, 
though incapable of blending into any real 
coalition. The objections urged are : first, To 
literature considered as a means of livelihood ; 
— as any part of the resources which a man 
should allow himself to rely on for his current 
income, or worldly credit, and respectability : 
here the evils anticipated by Mr. Coleridge are 
of a high and positive character, and such as 
tend directly to degrade the character, and 
indirectly to aggravate some heavy domestic 



22 SOLITUDE. 

evils. Second. To literature considered as the 
means of sufficiently occupying the intellect. 
Here the evil apprehended is an evil of defect ; 
it is alleged that literature is not adequate 
to the main end of giving due and regu- 
lar excitement to the mind and the spirits, 
unless combined with some other summons to 
mental exercise of periodical recurrence — de- 
termined by an overruling cause acting from 
without — and not dependent therefore on the 
accidents of individual will, or the caprices of 
momentary feeling springing out of temper or 
bodily health. Upon the last objection, as by 
far the most important in any case, and the 
only one at all applicable to yours, I would 
wish to say a word ; because my thoughts on 
that matter are from the abundance of my 
heart, and drawn up from the very depths of 
my own experience. If there has ever lived a 
man who might claim the privilege of speaking 
with emphasis and authority on this great 
question — By what means shall a man best 
support the activity of his own mind in soli- 
tude ? — I probably am that man ; and upon 
this ground that I have passed more of my 



PURE LITERATURE. 23 

life in absolute and unmitigated solitude, volun- 
tarily, and for intellectual purposes, than any 
person of my age whom I have ever either 
met with — heard of — or read of. With such 
pretensions, what is it that I offer as the result 
of my experience ? and how far does it coincide 
with the doctrine of Mr. Coleridge? Briefly 
this : I wholly agree with him that literature, 
in the proper acceptation of the term, as de- 
noting what is otherwise called Belles Lettres, 
&c, i. e., the most eminent of the fine arts, 
and so understood therefore as to exclude all 
science whatsoever, — is not, to use a Greek 
word, uvrapxris — not self-sufficing: no, not even 
when the mind is so far advanced that it 
can bring what have hitherto passed for merely 
literary or cesthetic questions, under the light 
of philosophic principles : when problems of 
" taste" have expanded to problems of human 
nature. And why 1 Simply for this reason — 
that our power to exercise the faculties on such 
subjects is not, as it is on others, in defiance 
of our own spirits : the difficulties and resist- 
ances to our progress in these investigations 
are not susceptible of minute and equable parti- 



24 I J URE LITERATURE. 

tion (as in mathematics) ; and therefore the 
movements of the mind cannot be continuous, 
but are either of necessity tumultuary and 
per saltum, or none at all. When, on the 
contrary, the difficulty is pretty equally dis- 
persed and broken up into a series of steps, no 
one of which demands any exertion sensibly 
more intense than the rest, nothing is required 
of the student beyond that sort of application 
and coherent attention which in a sincere 
student of any standing may be presumed as 
a habit already and inveterately established. 
The dilemma therefore to which a student of 
pure literature is continually reduced,— such a 
student suppose as the Schlegels, or any other 
man who has cultivated no acquaintance with 
the severer sciences, — is this : either he studies 
literature as a mere man of taste, and perhaps 
also as a philologer ; and in that case his under- 
standing must find a daily want of some mas- 
culine exercise to call it out, and give it play ; 
or (which is the rarest thing in the world) 
having begun to study literature as a philoso- 
pher, he seeks to renew that elevated walk of 
study at all opportunities : but this is often as 



MATHEMATICS. 25 

hopeless an effort as to a great poet it would 
be to sit down upon any predetermination to 
compose in his character of poet. Hence, 
therefore, — if (as too often it happens) he has 
not cultivated those studies (mathematics, e. g.) 
which present such difficulties as will bend to 
a resolute effort of the mind, and which have 
the additional recommendation that they are 
apt to stimulate and irritate the mind to make 
that effort ; he is often thrown by the very 
cravings of an unsatisfied intellect, and not by 
passion or inclination, upon some vulgar ex- 
citement of business or pleasure, which becomes 
constantly more necessary to him. I should 
do injustice to myself, if I were to say — that 
I owed this view of the case solely to my own 
experience ; the truth is — I easily foresaw, 
upon the suggestion almost of an instant, that 
literature would not suffice for my mind with 
my purposes. I foresaw this ; and I provided 
for it from the very first : but how ? Not in 
the way recommended by Mr. Coleridge, but 
according to a plan which you will collect 
from the letters I am to write ; and which 
therefore I need not here anticipate. What, 
3 



2G HAPPINESS FROM INTELLECTUAL SOURCES. 

however, you will say (for that is the main 
inquiry), what has been the success? has it 
warranted me to look back upon my past life, 
and to pronounce it upon the whole a happy 
one ? I answer in calmness and with sincerity 
of heart — Yes. To you with your knowledge 
of life I need not say that it is a vain thing for 
any man to hope that he can arrive at my age 
without many troubles — every man has his 
own ; and more especially he who has not 
insulated himself in this world, but has formed 
attachments and connexions, and has thus mul- 
tiplied the avenues through which his peace is 
assailable. But setting aside these inevitable 
deductions, I assure you, that the great account 
of my days, if summed up, w r ould present a 
great overbalance of happiness ; and of happi- 
ness during those years which I lived in soli- 
tude, of necessity derived exclusively from 
intellectual sources : such an evil indeed as 
time hanging heavy on my hands, I never 
experienced for a moment. On the other hand, 
to illustrate the benefits of my plan by a pic- 
ture of the very opposite plan, though pursued 
under the most splendid advantages, I would 



27 



direct your eyes to the case of an eminent 
living Englishman, with talents of the first 
order, and yet upon the evidence of all his 
works, ill satisfied at any time either with him- 
self or those of his own age. This English- 
man set out in life, as I conjecture, with a plan 
of study modelled upon that of Leibnitz — that 
is to say, he designed to make himself (as 
Leibnitz most truly was) a Polyhistor or 
Catholic student. For this reason, and be- 
cause at a very early age I had become fami- 
liar with the writings of Leibnitz, I have been 
often tempted to draw a parallel between that 
eminent German, and the no less eminent 
Englishman of whom I speak. In many things 
they agreed : these I shall notice at some other 
opportunity : only in general I will say that as 
both had minds not merely powerful, but dis- 
tinguished for variety and compass of power, 
so in both were these fine endowments com- 
pleted and accomplished for works of Hercu- 
lean endurance and continuity, by the alliance 
of a bodily constitution resembling that of 
horses. They were Centaurs : heroic intel- 
lects with brutal capacities of body. What 



28 LEIBNITZ- 

partiality in nature ! In general a man has 
reason to think himself well off in the great 
lottery of this life if he draws the prize of a 
healthy stomach without a mind, or the prize 
of a fine intellect with a crazy stomach : but 
that any man should draw both, is truly asto- 
nishing : and I suppose happens only once in 
a century. Thus far (as indeed much far- 
ther) they agreed : the points of difference 
were many, and not less remarkable: two I 
shall allege as pertinent to the matter before 
me. First, I remarked that Leibnitz, however 
anxious to throw out his mind upon the whole 
encyclopaedia of human research, yet did not 
forget to pay the price at which only any right 
to be thus discursive can be earned : he sacri- 
ficed to the austerer muses : knowing that 
God geometrizes eternally, he rightly supposed 
that in the universal temple Mathesis must fur- 
nish the master key which would open most 
shrines. The Englishman, on the contrary, 
I remarked to have been too self-indulgent and 
almost a voluptuary in his studies ; sparing 
himself all toil, and thinking apparently to 
evade the necessity of artificial power by an ex- 



COLERIDGE AND LEIBNITZ. 29 

traordinary exertion of his own native power. 
Neither as a boy, nor as a man, had he sub- 
mitted to any regular study or discipline of 
thought : his choice of subjects had lain too 
much amongst those dependent upon politics 
or other fleeting interests ; and when this had 
not happened, yet never amongst those which 
admitted of continuous thinking and study, and 
which support the spirits by perpetual influxes 
of pleasure, from the constant sense of success 
and difficulty overcome. As to the use of 
books, the German had been a discursive 
reader: the Englishman a desultory reader. 
Secondly, I remarked that Leibnitz was always 
cheerful and obliging ; most courteous and 
communicative to his fellow-labourers in lite- 
rature or science ; with a single exception 
(which rests, I think, as the sole stain upon 
his memory) just, and even generously just to 
the claims of others : uncensorious, and yet 
patient of censure; willing to teach, and most 
willing to be taught. Our English contempo- 
rary was not, I think, naturally less amiable 
than Leibnitz : and therefore I ascribe it to his 

unfortunate plan of study, leaving him of 

3* 



30 COLERIDGE. 

necessity too often with no subjects for intel- 
lectual exertion, but such as cannot be pursued 
successfully, unless in a state of genial spirits, 
— that we find him continually in ill humour, 
distempered and untuned with uncharitable 
feelings ; directing too harsh and acrimonious 
a spirit of criticism always against the age in 
which he lives, sometimes even against indivi- 
duals : querulous (Note A) under criticism, 
almost to the extent of believing himself the ob- 
ject of conspiracies and organized persecution : 
finally (which to me is far the gloomiest part of 
the picture) he neither will consent to believe that 
any man of his own age (at least of his own 
country) can teach him any thing — professing 
all his obligations to those who are dead, or 
else to some rusty old German ; nor finally 
will he consent to teach others, with the 
simple-minded magnanimity of a scholar, who 
should not seek to mystify and perplex his 
pupil ; or to illuminate only with half-lights : 
nor put himself on his guard against his reader, 
as against a person seeking to grow as know- 
ing as himself. On the contrary, who should 
rejoice to believe (if he could believe it) that 



THE CONTRAST. 31 

all the world knew as much as himself; and 
should adopt as his motto (which I make it 
my pride to have done, from my earliest days) 
the simple grandeur of that line in Chaucer's 
description of his scholar — 

" That gladly would he learn — and gladly teach." 

Such were the two features of difference 
which I had occasion perpetually to remark — 
between two great scholars, in many other 
features so closely resembling each other. In 
general these two features would be thought to 
exist independently ; but, with my previous 
theory of the necessity in all cases that, with 
studies of so uncertain and even morbid an 
effect upon the spirits as literature, should be 
combined some analytic exercise of inevitable 
healthy action, in this respect it was natural 
that I should connect them in my mind as 
cause and effect ; and, in that view, they gave 
a double attestation to Mr. Coleridge's advice 
where it agrees with mine — and to mine where 
it differs from his. 

Thus far I have considered Mr. Coleridge's 
advice simply as it respects the student. But 



32 LITERARY PERFORMANCES COMBINED 

the object of his studies is also entitled to 
some consideration : if it were better for the 
literary body, that all should pursue a pro- 
fession as their ipyov, (or business) and lite- 
rature as a rfapspyov (an accessary or mere 
by-business), — how far is literature itself 
likely to benefit by such an arrangement? 
Mr. Coleridge insists upon it that it will : and 
at page 225 he alleges seven names, to which 
at page 233 he adds an eighth, of celebrated 
men who have shown " the possibility of com- 
bining weighty performances in literature, with 
full and independent employment :" on various 
grounds it would be easy, I think, to cut down 
the list, as a list any way favourable for 
Mr. Coleridge's purpose, to one name — viz. 
that of Lord Bacon. But waiving his exam- 
ples, let us consider his arguments. The main 
business, the sp^ov, after exhausting a man's 
powers during the day, is supposed to leave 
three hours at night for the tfapspyov. Now we 
are to consider that our bright ideal of a lite- 
ratus may chance to be married : in fact, 
Mr. Coleridge agrees to allow him a wife : let 
us suppose a wife therefore ; and the more so, 



WITH INDEPENDENT EMPLOYMENT. 33 

because else he will perhaps take one without 
our permission. I ask then what portion of 
these three hours is our student to give up to 
the pleasure of his wife's society ? For, if a 
man finds pleasure in his wife's company at 
any time, I take it for granted that he would 
wish to spend the evening with her. Well, if 
you think so (says Mr. Coleridge, in effect, 
who had at first supposed the learned man 
to " retire into his study") in fact, he need not 
retire. How then 1 Why, he is to study, not 
in his study — but in his drawing-room, whilst 
" the social silence, or undisturbing voices of 
a wife or sister, will be like a restorative 
atmosphere." Silence, by the way, is a strange 
mode of social pleasure. 1 know not what 
Mr. Coleridge does when he sits with a young 
woman : for my part, I do " mon possible" to 
entertain her both with my wit and my wis- 
dom ; and am happy to hear her talk even 
though she should chance to be my own wife ; 
and never think of tolerating silence for one 
instant. But, not to quarrel about tastes, what 
is this " sister" that so pleasantly intrudes her- 
self into the party 1 The wife, I understand ; 



34 DOMESTIC LITERARY LIFE. 

but, in the north of England, or any place 
where I have lived, wives do not commonly 
present men with sisters, but with children. 
Suppose then our student's wife should give 
him a son ; or, what is noisier, a daughter ; 
or, what is noisier than either — both ? What's 
to be done then ? Here's a worshipful audience 
for a philosopher ; here's a promising company 
for " undisturbing voices," and " social silence." 
I admire Mr. Coleridge's way of blinking this 
question, of masking this youthful battery with 
" a sister." Children, however, are incidents 
that do and will occur in this life ; and must 
not be blinked. I have seen the case again 
and again ; and I say it, and say it with pain, 
that there is no more respect for philosophy 
amongst that lively part of society than Mr. 
Coleridge and I have for French Philosophy. 
They may, however, be banished to their nur- 
sery : true, but if they are ever admitted to the 
drawing-room, in houses where not much com- 
pany is kept, I observe that this visit is most 
interesting to all parties in the evening ; and, 
if they would otherwise be admitted, no good- 
natured student would wish to have their ex- 



DOMESTIC LITERARY LIFE. 35 

pulsion charged upon his books. After all, 
however, it is clear that Mr. Coleridge's voice 
is for the " retiring" system : and he gives us 
pretty plainly to understand (p. 230) that it is 
far better for men to be separated from their 
wives throughout the day. But in saying this, 
he forgets that in the case under consideration, 
the question is not so properly whether they 
are ever to be separated — as whether they are 
ever to meet. Indeed, taking what Mr. Cole- 
ridge says on this subject as addressed to lite- 
rary men especially, I know not why they 
should be supposed likely to make unhappy 
marriages more than other men. They are 
not called upon to pass more of their time with 
their wives than country gentlemen, or men 
generally without a profession. On the other 
hand, if we are to understand the words of 
Mr. Coleridge as of universal application, I 
hope that he gives us a very unfair view of the 
average tenour of life in this important parti- 
cular. Yet, if it be settled that men will quar- 
rel, and must quarrel with their wives, or their 
wives with them, unless separated, — would not 
a large screen meet the emergency 1 Or might 



36 LITERATURE THE SOLE PURSUIT. 

not the learned man, as soon as breakfast is 
ended, bow to his wife — and withdraw to his 
library; where he might study or be sulky, 
according to his taste ; leaving her for the rest 
of the day to amuse or to employ herself in 
the way most agreeable to her sex, rank, and 
previous education? But, in whatever way 
this difficulty may be disposed of, one point is 
clear to my judgment : that literature must 
decay, unless we have a class wholly dedi- 
cated to that service, not pursuing it as an 
amusement only with wearied and pre-occupied 
minds. The reproach of being a " nation 
boutiquiere" now so eminently inapplicable to 
the English, would become indeed just, and in 
the most unfortunate sense just, if from all our 
overstocked trades and professions we could 
not spare men enough to compose a garrison 
on permanent duty for the service of the 
highest purposes which grace and dignify our 
nature. 

You will not infer from all this any abate- 
ment in my old respect for Mr. Coleridge's 
great and various powers : no man admires 



TWO OriUM-EATERS. 37 

them more. But there is no treason, I hope, 
in starting a little game now and then from the 
thickets of The Friend, the Biographia Lite- 
raria, or even from Mr. Coleridge's Sermons, 
considering that they are Lay ones. Young men 
must have some exercise this frosty weather. 
Hereafter I shall have occasion to break a lance 
with Mr. Coleridge on more difficult questions : 
and very happy I shall be, if the amusement 
which I shall make it my business to strike out, 
by my hammering, from the flinty rock of his 
metaphysics, should either tempt any one to 
look into his valuable writings — or should tempt 
Mr. Coleridge to sally out of his hiding-place 
in a philosophic passion, and to attack me with 
the same freedom. Such an exhibition must 
be amusing to the public. I conceive that two 

transcendentalists, who are also two- s, can 

hardly ever before have stripped in any ring. 
But, by the way, I wish he would leave trans- 
cendentalism to me and other young men : for, 
to say the truth, it does not prosper in his 
hands. I will take charge of the public prin- 
ciples in that point : and he will thus be more 
4 



38 THE ANCIENT MARINER. 

at leisure to give us another Ancient Mariner ; 
which, I will answer for it, the whole literary 
body would receive with gratitude and a fervent 
" plaudite." 

Yours, most faithfully, 

X. Y. Z. 

December 24. 



LETTER II. 

Outline of the Work. — Notice of former Writers on the 
same subject. 

My Dear M , 



In this, my second and last letter of preface, 
I shall settle the idea and the arrangement of 
my papers : there will be in all about seven, of 
which four will exhibit the material on which 
the student is to work ; the other three, the 
tools with which the workmanship is to be con- 
ducted. First, ivhat is to be done ; and second- 
ly, haw is the natural and obvious distribution 
of the work : that is to say, the business is to 
assign, first, the end, and, secondly, the means. 
And, because the end should reasonably deter- 
mine the means, it would seem natural that in 
the arrangement of the work, all which relates 
to that should have precedency. Nevertheless, 
I mean to invert this order ; and for the follow- 
ing reason : all that part of the means, which 



40 INSTRUMENTS OF STUDY. 

are so entirely determined by the end as to 
presuppose its full and circumstantial develope- 
ment, may be concluded specially restricted to 
that individual end ; in proportion to this re- 
striction they will, therefore, be of narrow 
application, and are best treated in direct con- 
nexion and concurrently with the object to 
which they are thus appropriated. On the 
other hand, those means or instruments of 
thought, which are sufficiently complex and 
important to claim a separate attention to them- 
selves, are usually of such large and extensive 
use, that they belong indifferently to all schemes 
of study, and may safely be premised in any 
plan, however novel in its principles, or pecu- 
liar in its tendencies. What are these general 
instruments of study 1 According to my view 
they are three; first, Logic; secondly, Lan- 
guages ; thirdly, Arts of Memory. With re- 
spect to these, it is not necessary that any 
special end should be previously given : be his 
end what it may, every student must have 
thoughts to arrange, knowledge to transplant, 
and facts to record. Means, which are thus 
universally requisite, may safely have pre- 



OUTLINE OF THE PLAN. 41 

cedency of the end : and it will not be a pre- 
posterous order, if I dedicate my first three 
letters to the several subjects of Logic, Lan- 
guages, and Arts of Memory ; which will com- 
pose one half of my scheme : leaving to the 
other half, the task of unfolding the course of 
study for which these instruments will be avail- 
able. Having thus settled the arrangement, 
and implicitly, therefore, settled in part the idea 
or ratio of my scheme, — I shall go on to add 
what may be necessary to confine your expec- 
tations to the right track, and prevent them 
from going above or below the true character 
of the mark I aim at. I profess then to attempt 
something much higher than merely directions 
for a course of reading. Not that such a work 
might not be of eminent service ; and in par- 
ticular at this time, and with a constant adapta- 
tion to the case of rich men, not literary, I am 
of opinion, that no more useful book could be 
executed than a series of letters (addressed, for 
example, to country gentlemen, merchants, &c.) 
on the formation of a library. The uses of 
such a treatise, however, are not those which I 
contemplate ; for either it would presume and 
4# 



42 AN ORGANON OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 

refer to a plan of study already settled ; and in 
that light, it is a mere complement of the plan 
I propose to execute : or else it would attempt 
to involve a plan of study in the course of read- 
ing suggested ; and that would be neither more 
nor less than to do in concrete), what it is far 
more convenient as well as more philosophical 
to do (as I am now going to do) directly and 
in abstracto. A mere course of reading, there- 
fore, is much below what I propose ; on the 
other hand, an organon of the human under- 
standing is as much above it : such a work is 
a labour for a life : that is to say, though it 
may take up but a small part of every day, yet 
could it in no other way accumulate its mate- 
rials, than by keeping the mind everlastingly 
on the watch to seize upon such notices as may 
arise daily throughout a life under the favour of 
accident or occasion. Forty years are not too 
large a period for such a work ; and my present 
work, however maturely meditated, must be 
executed with rapidity. Here, in fact, I do but 
sketch or trace in outline (w£ sv rutfo) <7rsp»\a/3siv), 
what there it would become my duty to de- 
velope, to fill up in detail, to apply, and to 



ENDS AND MEANS. 43 

illustrate on the most extensive scale. After 
having attempted in my first part to put you in 
possession of the best method for acquiring the 
instruments of study; and with respect to logic 
in particular, having directed a philosophic 
light upon its true meaning and purpose — with 
the hope of extinguishing that anarchy of errors 
which have possessed this ground from the 
time of Lord Bacon to the moment at which I 
write, — I then, in the second division, address 
myself to the question of ends* Upon which 
word let me distinguish : upon ends, in an abso- 
lute sense, as ultimate ends, it is presumption 
in any man to offer counsel to another of ma- 
ture age. Advice of that sort, given under 
whatever hollow pretences of kindness, is to be 
looked upon as arrogance in the most repulsive 
shape; and to be rejected with that sort of 
summary disdain, which any man not of ser- 
vile nature would testify towards him who 
should attempt to influence his choice of a wife. 
A student of mature age must be presumed to 
be best acquainted with his own talents, and his 
own intellectual infirmities, with his "forte" 
and his " foible," with his own former experi- 



44 SYSTEM OF STUDY. 

ence of failure or success, and with the direction 
in which his inclinations point. Far be it from 
me to violate by the spirit of my counsels a 
pride so reasonable, which, in truth, I hold 
sacred. My scheme takes an humbler ground. 
Ends indeed, in a secondary sense, the latter 
half professes to deal with : but such ends as, 
though bearing that character, in relation to 
what is purely and merely instrumental, yet 
again become means in relation to ends abso- 
lutely so called. The final application of your 
powers and knowledge it is for yourself only 
to determine : my pretensions in regard to that 
election are limited to this — that I profess to 
place you on a vantage ground from which you 
may determine more wisely, by determining 
from a higher point of survey. My purpose is 
not to map the whole course of your journey, 
but to serve as your guide to that station, at 
which you may be able to lay down your future 
route for yourself. The former half of my 
work I have already described to you : the lat- 
ter half endeavours to construct such a system 
of study as shall combine these two advantages 
— 1. Systematic unity; i. e. such a principle of 



FOUNDATIONS BROAD AND DEEF. 45 

internal connexion, as that the several parts of 
the plan shall furnish assistance interchange- 
ably : 2. The largest possible compass of ex- 
ternal relations. Some empires, you know, 
are built for growth : others are essentially im- 
progressive, but are built for duration, on some 
principle of strong internal cohesion. Systems 
of knowledge, however, and schemes of study, 
should propose both ends: — they should take 
their foundations broad and deep, 

And lay great bases for eternity : 

which is the surest key to internal and systema- 
tic connexion : and, secondly, they should pro- 
vide for future growth and accretion ; regarding 
all knowledge as a nucleus and centre of accu- 
mulation for other knowledge. It is on this 
latter principle, by the way, that the system of 
education in our public schools, however other- 
wise defective, is justly held superior to the 
specious novelties of our suburban academies ; 
for it is more radical, and adapted to a larger 
superstructure. Such, I say, is the character 
of my scheme ; and by the very act of claiming 
for it, as one of its benefits, that it leaves you 



46 ESSAYS DE RATIONE STUDII. 

in the centre of large and comprehensive rela- 
tions to other parts of knowledge ; it is pretty 
apparent that I do not presume to suggest in 
what direction of these manifold relations you 
should afterwards advance ; that, as I have 
now sufficiently explained, will be left to your 
own self-knowledge ; but to your self-know- 
ledge illumined at the point where I leave you 
by that other knowledge which my scheme of 
study professes to communicate. 

From this general outline of my own plan, I 
am led by an easy transition to a question of 
yours, respecting the merits of the most cele- 
brated amongst those who have trod the same 
ground in past times. Excepting only a little 
treatise of Erasmus, cle Ratione Stuclii, all the 
essays on this subject by eminent Continental 
Writers appeared in the 17th century ; and of 
these, a large majority before the year 1640. 
They were universally written in Latin ; and, 
the Latin of that age being good, they are so far 
agreeable to read ; beyond this, and the praise 
of elegance in their composition and arrange- 
ment, I have not much to say in their behalf. 
About the year 1645, Lewis Elzevir published 



DIDACTIC POETRY. 47 

a, corpus of. these essays, amounting in all to 
four-and-twenty ; in point of elegance and good 
sense, their merits are various ; thus far they 
differ : but, in regard to the main point, they 
hold a lamentable equality of pretension — 
being all thoroughly hollow and barren of any 
practical use. (Note B.) I cannot give you a 
better notion of their true place and relation to 
the class of works of which you are in search of, 
than by an analogy drawn from the idea of 
didactic poetry, as it exists in the Roman lite- 
rature and our own. So thoroughly is this 
sometimes misunderstood, that I have seen it 
insisted on as a merit in a didactic poem — that 
the art, which it professed to deliver, might be 
learned and practised in all its technicalities, 
without other assistance than that which the 
poem supplied. But, had this been true, — so 
far from being a praise, it would instantly have 
degraded the poem from its rank as a work 
among the products of Fine Arts : ipso facto, 
such a poem would have settled down from that 
high intellectual rank into the ignoble preten- 
sions of mechanic art, in which the metre, and 
the style which metre introduces, would imme- 



48 DIDACTIC POETRY. 

diately have lost their justification. The true 
idea of didactic poetry is this ; either the poet 
selects an art which furnishes the occasion for 
a series of picturesque exhibitions (as Virgil, 
Dyer, &c): and, in that case, it is true that he 
derives part of his power from the art which he 
delivers ; not, however, from what is essential 
to the art, but from its accidents and adjuncts. 
Either he does this ; or else (as is the case with 
Lord Roscommon, Pope, &c.) so far from 
seeking in his subject for any part of the power, 
he seeks in that only for the resistance with 
which he contends by means of the power de- 
rived from the verse and the artifices of style. 
To one case or other of this alternative all 
didactic poems are reducible; and, allowing for 
the differences of rhetoric and poetry, the same 
ideal must have presided in the composition of 
the various essays of the 17th century, ad- 
dressed to students : the subject was felt to be 
austere and unattractive, and almost purely 
scholastic ; it was the ambition of the writers, 
therefore, to show that they could present it in 
a graceful shape : and that under their treat- 
ment, the subject might become interesting to 



DR. WATTS. 49 

the reader, as an arena, upon which skill was 
exhibited, baffling or evading difficulties, — even 
at the price of all benefit to the anxious and 
earnest disciple. Spartam nactus es, was their 
motto, hanc exorna ; and like Cicero, in his Idea 
of an Orator, with relation to the practical 
duties of the forum ; or Lord Shaftesbury, with 
relation to the accurate knowledge of the 
academic philosophy ; they must be supposed 
deliberately to have made a selection from the 
arts or doctrines before them, for the sake of a 
beautiful composition which should preserve all 
its parts in harmony, and only secondarily (if 
at all) to have regarded the interests of the 
student. By all of them the invitation held out 
was not so much Indocti discant, as Ament 
meminisse periti. 

In our own country there have been nume- 
rous "letters," &c. on this interesting subject; 
but not one that has laid any hold on the public 
mind, except the two works of Dr. Watt's, 
especially that upon the " Improvement of the 
Mind." Being the most imbecile of books, it 
must have owed its success, 1. To the secta- 
rian zeal of his party in religion — his fellows 
5 



50 DR. WATTS. 

and his followers : 2. To the fact of its having 
gained for its author, from two Scotch universi- 
ties, the highest degree they could bestow: 
3. To the distinguished honour of having been 
adopted as a lecture book (q. as an examination 
book?) by both English universities : 4. To the 
extravagant praise of Dr. Johnson, amongst 
whose infirmities it was to praise warmly, when 
he was flattered by the sense of his own great 
superiority in powers and knowledge. Dr. 
Johnson supposes it to have been modelled on 
Locke's Conduct of the Understanding; but 
surely this is as ludicrous as to charge, upon 
Silence, any elaborate imitation of Mr. Justice 
Shallow. That Silence may have borrowed 
from another man half of a joke, or echoed the 
roar of his laughter, is possible ; but of any 
more grave or laborious attempts to rob he 
stands ludicrously acquitted by the exemplary 
imbecility of his nature. No: Dr. Watts did 
not steal from Mr. Locke: in matters of dulness 
a man is easily original : and I suppose that 
even Feeble or Shallow might have had credit 
for the effort necessary to the following coun- 



LOCKE. 51 

sels, taken at random from Dr. Watts, at the 
page where the book has happened to fall open. 

1. Get a distinct and comprehensive know- 
ledge of the subject which you treat of; survey- 
it on all sides, and make yourself perfect mas- 
ter of it : then (then ! what then ? — Think of 
Feeble making an inference. Well, " then,") 
you will have all the sentiments that relate to 
it in your view: 2. Be well skilled in the lan- 
guage which you speak : 3. Acquire a variety 
of words, a copia verborum. Let your memory 
be rich in synonymous terms, p. 228, edit. 
1817. 

Well done, most magnanimous Feeble. — 
Such counsels, I suppose that any man might 
have produced ; and you will not wish to see 
criticised. Let me rather inquire, what com- 
mon defect it is which has made the works of 
much more ingenious men, and in particular 
that of Locke, utterly useless for the end pro- 
posed. The error in these books is the same 
which occurs in books of ethics, and which has 
made them more or less useless for any practi- 
cal purpose. As it is important to put an end 
to all delusion in matters of such grave and 



52 LOGICAL ILLUSTRATION. 

general concern as the improvement of our 
understandings, or the moral valuation of ac- 
tions ; and as I repeat that the delusion here 
alluded to has affected both equally (so far as 
they can be affected by the books written pro- 
fessedly to assist them), it may be worth while 
to spend a few lines in exposing it. I believe 
that you are so far acquainted with the struc- 
ture of a syllogism as to know how to distin- 
guish between the major and minor proposition: 
there is, indeed, a technical rule which makes 
it impossible to err ; but you will have no need 
of that, if you once apprehend the rationale of 
a syllogism in the light under which I will here 
place it. In every syllogism one of the two 
premises (the major) lays down a rule, under 
which rule the other (the minor) brings the 
subject of your argument as a particular case.. 
The minor is, therefore, distinguished from the 
major by an act of the judgment, viz. : a sub- 
sumption of a special case under a rule. Now 
consider how this applies to morals: here the 
conscience supplies the general rule, or major 
proposition ; and about this there is no question ; 
but to bring the special case of conduct, which 



CONDUCT OP THE UNDERSTANDING. 53 

is the subject of your inquiry, under this general 
rule — here first commences the difficulty ; and 
just upon this point are ethical treatises for the 
most part silent. Accordingly no man thinks 
of consulting them for his direction under any 
moral perplexities ; if he reads them at all, it is 
for the gratification of his understanding in 
surveying the order and relation amongst the 
several members of a system ; never for the 
information of his moral judgment. 

For any practical use in that way, a casuistry, 
i. e, a subsumption of the cases most frequently 
recurring in ordinary life, should be combined 
(Note C) with the system of moral principles ; — 
the latter supplying the major (or normal) pro- 
position ; the former supplying the minor pro- 
position, which brings the special case under the 
rule. With the help of this explanation, you 
will easily understand on what principle I ven- 
ture to denounce, as unprofitable, the whole 
class of books written on the model of Locke's 
Conduct of the Understanding. According to 
Locke, the student is not to hurry, but again 
not to loiter ; not to be too precipitate, nor yet 
too hesitating ; not to be too confiding, but far 
5* 



54 CONDUCT OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 

less too suspicious ; not too obstinate in his own 
opinions, yet again (for the love of God !) not 
too resigned to those of others ; not too general 
in his divisions, but (as he regards his own 
soul) not too minute, &c. &c. &c. 

But surely no man, bent on the improvement 
of his faculties, was ever guilty of these errors 
under these names ; that is, knowingly and 
deliberately. If he is so at all, it is either that 
he has not reflected on his own method ; or 
that, having done so, he has allowed himself, 
in the act or habit offending these rules on a 
false view of its tendency and character ; be- 
cause, in fact, having adopted as his rule (or 
major) that very golden mean which Mr. 
Locke recommends, and which, without Mr. 
Locke's suggestion he would have adopted for 
himself; — it has yet been possible for him by 
an erroneous judgment, to take up an act or 
habit under the rule — which with better ad- 
vice he would have excluded ; which advice is 
exactly what Mr. Locke has — not given. Over 
and above all this the method of the book is 
aphoristic ; and, as might be expected from 
that method, without a plan ; and, which is 



MATHEMATICS. 55 

partly the cause and partly the consequence of 
having a plan, without a foundation. This 
word foundation leads me to one remark sug- 
gested by your letter; and with that I shall 
conclude my own. When I spoke above of the 
student's taking his foundations broad and deep, 
I had my eye chiefly on the corner-stones of 
strong-built knowledge, viz. : on logic ; on a 
proper choice of languages ; on a particular 
part of what is called metaphysics; and on 
mathematics. Now you allege (I suppose upon 
occasion of my references to mathematics in 
my last letter) that you have no " genius" for 
mathematics ; and you speak with the usual 
awe (pavor attonitorum) of the supposed "pro- 
fundity" of intellect necessary to a great pro- 
gress in this direction. Be assured that you 
are in utter error ; though it be an error all 
but universal. In mathematics, upon two irre- 
sistible arguments which I shall set in a clear 
light, when I come to explain the procedure of 
the mind with regard to that sort of evidence, 
and that sort of investigation, there can be no 
subtlety: all minds are levelled except as to 
the rapidity of the course ; and, from the entire 



56 MATHEMATICS. 

absence of all those acts of mind which do 
really imply profundity of intellect, it is a ques- 
tion whether an idiot might not be made an 
excellent mathematician. Listen not to the 
romantic notions of the world on this subject ; 
above all listen not to mathematicians. Mathe- 
maticians, as mathematicians, have no business 
with the question. It is one thing to under- 
stand mathematics ; another and far different 
to understand the philosophy of mathematics. 
With respect to this, it is memorable, that in no 
one of the great philosophical questions which 
the ascent of mathematics has from time to time 
brought up above the horizon of our specula- 
tive view, has any mathematician who was 
merely such (however eminent) had depth of 
intellect adequate to its solution : without in- 
sisting on the absurdities published by mathe- 
maticians, on the philosophy of the infinite, 
since that notion was introduced into mathe- 
matics ; or on the fruitless attempts of all but 
a metaphysician to settle the strife between the 
conflicting modes of valuing living forces ; — I 
need only ask what English or French mathe- 
matician has been able to exhibit the notion of 



EUCLID. 57 

negative quantities, in a theory endurable even 
to a popular philosophy, or which has com- 
manded any assent? Or again, what Algebra 
is there existing which does not contain a false 
and ludicrous account of the procedure in that 
science, as contrasted with the procedure in 
geometry ? But, not to trouble you with more 
of these cases so opprobrious to mathematicians, 
lay this to heart, that mathematics are very 
easy and very important ; they are, in fact, the 
organ of one large division of human know- 
ledge. And, as it is of consequence that you 
should lose no time by waiting for my letter on 
that subject, let me forestal so much of it — as 
to advise that you would immediately com- 
mence with Euclid ; reading those eight books 
of the Elements which are usually read, and 
the Data. If you should go no farther, so 
much geometry will be useful and delightful : 
and so much, by reading for two hours a-day, 
you will easily accomplish in about thirteen 
weeks, i. e. one quarter of a year. 

Yours, most truly, X. Y. Z. 



LETTER III. 

My Dear Sir, 

In my three following letters I am to consi- 
der, 1st, Languages, 2d, Logic; Arts of Me- 
mory ; not as parts of knowledge sought or 
valued on their own account, but simply as the 
most general amongst the means and instru- 
ments of the student, estimated therefore with 
a reference to the number and importance of 
the ends which they further, and fairly to be 
presumed in all schemes of self-improvement 
liberally planned. In this letter I will speak of 
languages ; my thoughts, and a twenty years' 
experience as a student, having furnished me 
with some hints that may be useful in deter- 
mining your choice, where choice is at first 
sight so difficult, and the evils of an erroneous 
choice so great. On this Babel of an earth which 
you and I inhabit, there are said to be about 
three thousand languages and jargons. Of 



LANGUAGES. 59 

nearly five hundred, you will find a specimen 
in the Mithridates of Adelung,andin some other 
German works of more moderate bulk (NoteD). 
The final purposes of this vast engine for sepa- 
rating nations, it is not difficult in part to per- 
ceive ; and it is presumable that these purposes 
have been nearly fulfilled ; since there can be 
little doubt that within the next two centuries, all 
the barbarous languages of the earth (i. e. those 
without a literature) will be one after one stran- 
gled and exterminated by four European lan- 
guages, viz. the English, the Spanish, the Por- 
tuguese, and the Russian. Central Africa, and 
that only, can resist the momentum of civiliza- 
tion for a longer period. Now, languages are 
sometimes studied, not as a key to so many 
bodies of literature, but as an object per se ; 
for example, by Sir William Jones, Dr. Ley- 
den, &c. : and where the researches are con- 
ducted with the enthusiasm and the sagacity 
of the late extraordinary Professor of Oriental 
Languages in Edinburgh, Dr. Alexander Mur- 
ray, it is impossible to withhold one's admira- 
tion ; he had a theory, and distinct purposes, 
which shed light upon his paths that are else 



60 LANGUAGES. 

" as dark as Erebus." Such labours conducted 
in such a spirit must be important, if the eldest 
records of the human race be important ; for 
the affinities of language furnish the main 
clue for ascending, through the labyrinths of 
nations, — to their earliest origins and con- 
nexions. To a professed linguist, therefore, the 
natural advice would be — examine the struc- 
ture of as many languages as possible ; gather 
as many thousand specimens as possible into 
your Jwrtus siccus ; beginning with the eldest 
forms of the Teutonic, viz. : the Visigothic and 
the Icelandic, for which the aids rendered by 
modern learning are immense. To a professed 
philologist, I say, the natural advice would be 
this. But to you, who have no such purposes, 
and whom I suppose to wish for languages 
simply as avenues to literature not otherwise 
accessible, I will frankly say — start from this 
principle — that the act of learning a language 
is in itself an evil ; and so frame your selec- 
tion of languages, that the largest possible 
body of literature available for your purposes 
shall be laid open to you at the least possible 
price of time and mental energy squandered in 



MENTAL DISCIPLINE. 61 

this direction. I say this with some earnest- 
ness. For I will not conceal from you, that 
one of the habits most unfavourable to the 
growth and sincere culture of the intellect in 
our day is the facility with which men surren- 
der themselves to the barren and ungenial 
labour of language learning. Unless balanced 
by studies that give more exercise, more ex- 
citement, and more aliment to the faculties, 
I am convinced, by all I have observed, that 
this practice is the dry rot of the human mind. 
How should it be otherwise 1 The act of learn- 
ing a science is good, not only for the know- 
ledge which results, but for the exercise which 
attends it : the energies which the learner is 
obliged to put forth, are true intellectual ener- 
gies : and his very errors are full of instruc- 
tion. He fails to construct some leading idea ; 
or he even misconstructs it : he places himself 
in a false position with respect to certain pro- 
positions ; views them from a false centre ; 
makes a false or an imperfect antithesis ; ap- 
prehends a definition with insufficient rigour ; 
or fails in his use of it to keep it self-consistent. 
These and a thousand other errors are met by 
6 



62 MENTAL DISCIPLINE. 

a thousand appropriate resources — all of a true 
intellectual character ; comparing, combining, 
distinguishing, generalizing, subdividing, acts 
of abstraction and evolution, of synthesis and 
analysis, until the most torpid minds are venti- 
lated, and healthily excited by this introversion 
of the faculties upon themselves. But in the 
study of language (with an exception, however, 
to a certain extent, in favour of Latin and 
Greek, which [ shall notice hereafter), nothing 
of all this can take place, and for one simple 
reason — that all is arbitrary. Wherever there 
is a law and system — wherever there is rela- 
tion and correspondence of parts, the intellect 
will make its way ; will interfuse amongst the 
dry bones the blood and pulses of life, and 
create " a soul under the ribs of death." But 
whatsoever is arbitrary and conventional, which 
yields no reason why it should be this way 
rather than that, obeying no theory or law, 
must, by its lifeless forms, kill and mortify the 
action of the intellect. If this be true, it be- 
comes every student to keep watch upon him- 
self, that he does not upon any light tempta- 
tion allow himself an overbalance of studv in 



LANGUAGES. 63 

this direction. For the temptations to such an 
excess, which in our days are more powerful 
than formerly, are at all times too powerful. 
Of all the weapons in the armoury of the 
scholar, none is so showy or so captivating to 
common-place minds as skill in languages. 
Vanity is, therefore, one cause of the undue 
application to languages. A second is — the 
national fashion. What nation but ourselves 
ever made the language of its eternal enemy an 
essential part of even a decent (Note E) educa- 
tion? What should we think of Roman policy, 
if, during the second Punic war, the Carthagi- 
nian language had been taught as a matter of 
course to the children of every Roman citizen ? 
But. a third cause, which I believe has more 
efficacy than either of the former, is mere 
levity ; the simple fact of being unballasted by 
any sufficient weight of plan or settled purpose, 
to present a counterpoise to the slightest mo- 
mentum this way or that, arising from any 
impulse of accident or personal caprice. When 
there is no resistance, a breath of air will be 
sufficient to determine the motion. I remem- 
ber once, that happening to spend an autumn 



64 ACCIDENTAL IMPULSES. 

in Ilfracombe, on the west coast of Devon- 
shire — I found all the young ladies whom I 
knew, busily employed on the study of Marine 
Botany : on the opposite shore of the channel, 
in all the South Welch ports of Tenby, &c. 
they were no less busy upon Conchology ; in 
neither case from any previous love of the 
science, but simply availing themselves of their 
local advantages. Now, here a man must 
have been truly ill-natured to laugh. For the 
studies were in both instances beautiful : a 
love for it was created, if it had not pre- 
existed : and to women, and young women, 
the very absence of all austere unity of pur- 
pose and self-determination was becoming and 
graceful. Yet, when this same levity and 
liability to casual impulses come forward in 
the acts and purposes of a man, I must own, 
that I have often been unable to check myself 
in something like a contemptuous feeling : nor 
should I wish to check myself, but for remem- 
bering how many men of energetic minds con- 
stantly give way to slight and inadequate mo- 
tives, simply for want of being summoned to 
any anxious reviews of their own conduct. 



ACCIDENTAL IMPULSES. 65 

How many cases have I known where a parti- 
cular study, as, suppose, of the Hartleian phi- 
losophy, was pursued throughout a whole col- 
lege, — simply because a man of talents had 
talked of it in the junior common-room : how 
many, where a book became popular, because 
it had been mentioned in the House of Com- 
mons : how many, where a man resolved to 
learn Welch, because he was spending a month 
or two at Barmouth, — or Italian, because he 
had found a Milan series of the poets in his 
aunt's library, — or the violin, because he had 
bought a fine one at an auction. 

In 1808-9, you must well remember what 
a strong impulse the opening of the Peninsular 
War communicated to our current literature : 
the presses of London and the provinces teemed 
with editions of Spanish books, dictionaries, 
and grammars : and the motions of the British 
armies were accompanied by a corresponding 
activity among British compositors. From the 
just interest which is now renewed in Spanish 
affairs, I suppose something of the same scene 
will recur. Now, for my own part, though 
undoubtedly I would, for the sake of Calderon 
6* 



66 SELF-DETERMINATION. 

alone (judging of him through a German trans- 
lation), most willingly study the Spanish lite- 
rature (if I had leisure) ; yet I should be 
ashamed to do so upon the irrelevant and 
occasional summons of an interesting situation 
in Spanish affairs. I should feel that by such 
an act I confessed a want of pre-occupation in 
my mind — a want of self-origination in my 
plans — an inertness of will, which, above all 
things, I do and ought to detest. If it were 
right for me (right I mean in relation to my 
previous scheme of study) to have dedicated a 
portion of my life to the Spanish literature, it 
must have been right before the Spanish poli- 
tics took an interesting aspect : if it were not 
right, it could not become so upon a suggestion 
so purely verbal as the recurrence of the word 
Spanish in the London journals. 

This, I am sure, you will interpret candidly. 
I am not supposing you less furnished with 
powers of self-determination than myself. T 
have no personal allusion or exception : but T 
suppose every man liable to be acted on unduly, 
or by inadequate impulses, so long as he is not 
possessed by some plan that may steady that 



BOOKS. 67 

levity of nature which is implied in the mere 
state of indifference to all settled plans. This 
levity in our days, meets with an accidental 
ally in the extraordinary facilities for studying 
languages in the shape of elementary books ; 
which facilities of themselves form a fourth 
cause of the disproportionate study given to 
languages. But a fifth cause occurs to me, of 
a less selfish and indolent character than any 
of the preceding ; and as it seems to me hardly 
possible that it should not influence you more 
or less to make your choice of languages too 
large and comprehensive, I shall tell you from 
my own case, what may be sufficient to set you 
on your guard against too much indulgence to 
a feeling in itself just and natural, In my 
youthful days I never entered a great library, 
suppose of 100,000 volumes, but my predomi- 
nant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of 
mind — not much unlike that which drew tears 
from Xerxes, on viewing his immense army, 
and reflecting that in 100 years not one soul 
would remain alive. To me, with respect to 
the books, the same effect would be brought 
about by my own death. Here, said I, are 



68 BOOKS. 

100,000 books — the worst of them capable of 
giving me some pleasure and instruction ; and 
before I can have had time to extract the honey 
from one-twentieth of this hive, in all likelihood 
I shall be summoned away. This thought, I 
am sure, must often have occurred to yourself; 
and you may judge how much it was aggra- 
vated, when I found that, subtracting all merely 
professional books — books of reference (as dic- 
tionaries, &c. &c. &c.) — from the universal 
library of Europe, there would still remain a 
total of not less than twelve hundred thousand 
books over and above what the presses of 
Europe are still disemboguing into the ocean of 
literature ; many of them immense folios or 
quartos. Now I had been told by an eminent 
English author, that with respect to one single 
work, viz : the History of Thuanus, a calcula- 
tion had been made by a Portuguese monk, 
which showed, that barely to read over the 
words (and allowing no time for reflection) 
would require three years' labour, at the rate 
of (I think) three hours a-day. Further, I had 
myself ascertained, that to read a duodecimo 
volume in prose, of four hundred pages — all 



BOOKS. 69 

skipping being barred, and the rapid reading 
which belongs to the vulgar interest of a novel — 
was a very sufficient work for one day. Con- 
sequently three hundred and sixty-five per 
annum, that is (with a very small allowance 
for the claims of life on one's own account, and 
that of one's friends), one thousand for every 
triennium— that is, ten thousand for thirty 
years — will be as much as a man, who lives 
for that only, can hope to accomplish. From 
the age of twenty to eighty, therefore, if a man 
were so unhappy as to live to eighty, the utmost 
he could hope to travel through would be twenty 
thousand volumes; a number not, perhaps, 
above jive per cent, of what the mere current 
literature of Europe would accumulate in that 
period of years. Now from this amount of 
twenty thousand, make a deduction on account 
of books of larger size — books to be studied — 
and books to be read slowly, and many times 
over (as all works in which the composition is 
a principal part of their pretensions), allow a 
fair discount for such deductions, and the 
twenty thousand will, perhaps, shrink to eight 
or five thousand. All this arithmetical state- 



70 MORBID SENSITIVENESS. 

ment you must not conceive to relate to any 
fanciful case of misery : no, I protest to you, 
that I speak of as real a case of suffering as 
ever can have existed. And it soon increased. 
For the same panic seized upon me with respect 
to the works of art: I found that I had no 
chance of hearing the twenty-five thousandth 
part of the music that had been produced ; and 
so of other arts. Nor was this all. For, hap- 
pening to say to myself one night as I entered 
a long street, " I shall never see the one thou- 
sandth part of the people who are living in this 
single street," it occurred to me that every man 
and woman was a most interesting book, if one 
knew how to read them. Here opened upon 
me a new world of misery. For if books and 
works of art existed by millions, men existed 
by hundreds of millions. Nay, even if it had 
been possible for me to know all of my own 
generation, yet, like Dr. Faustus who desired 
to see " Helen of Greece," I should still have 
been dissatisfied ; for what was one generation 
to all that were past? Nay, my madness took 
yet a higher flight. For I considered that I 
stood on a little isthmus of time, which con- 



DESPOTISM OF ONE FEELING. 71 

nected the two great worlds — the past and the 
future. I stood in equal relation to both ; I 
asked for admittance to one as much as to the 
other. Even if a necromancer could have 
brought up the great men of the seventeenth 
century, I should have said, what good does all 
this do me? where are those of the twentieth cen- 
tury? and so onward ! In short, I never turned 
my thoughts this way, but I fell into a down- 
right midsummer madness ; I could not enjoy 
what I had, craving for that which I had not, 
and could not have ; was thirsty like Tantalus 
in the midst of waters ; even when using my 
present wealth, thought only of its perishable- 
ness ; and " wept to have — what I so feared to 
lose!" But all this, you will say, was by my 
own admission " madness." Madness, I grant, 
but such a madness — not as lunatics suffer — 
no hallucination of the brain ; but a madness 
like that of misers — the usurpation and despo- 
tism of one feeling, natural in itself, but travel- 
ling into an excess, which at last upset all 
which should have balanced it. And I must 
assert, that with allowance for difference of 
degrees, no madness is more common. Many 



72 BOOKS. 

of those who give themselves up to the study 
of Languages do so under the same disease 
which I have described ; and, if they do not 
carry it on to the same extremity of wretched- 
ness, it is because they are not so logical, and 
so consistent in their madness, as I was. Un- 
der our present enormous accumulation of 
books, I do affirm, that a miserable distraction 
of choice (which is the germ of such a madness) 
must be very generally incident to the times ; 
that the symptoms of it are, in fact, very preva- 
lent ; and that one of the chief symptoms is an 
enormous " gluttonism" for books, and for 
adding language to language ; and in this way 
it is that literature becomes much more a source 
of torment than of pleasure. Nay, I will go 
farther, and will say that of many, who escape 
this disease, some owe their privilege simply to 
the narrowness of their minds and the contrac- 
ted range of their sympathies with literature — 
which, enlarged, they would soon lose it ! others 
again owe it to their situation ; as, for instance, 
in a country town, where, books being few f a 
man can use up all his materials, his appetite 
is unpalled — and he is grateful for the loan of 



LITERARY DISPLAY. 73 

a MS. &c. : but bring him up to London — show 
him the wagon loads of unused stores which he 
is at liberty to work up — tell him that these 
even are but a trifle, perhaps, to what he may 
find in the libraries of Paris, Dresden, Milan, 
dec. — of religious houses — of English noble- 
men, &c. ; and this same man, who came up 
to London blithe and happy, will leave it pale 
and sad. You have ruined his peace of mind : 
a subject which he fancied himself capable of 
exhausting, he finds to be a labour for centu- 
ries : he has no longer the healthy pleasure of 
feeling himself master of his materials ; he is 
degraded into their slave. Perhaps I dwell too 
much on this subject ; but allow me, before I 
leave it, to illustrate what I have said by the 
case of two eminent literati, who are at this 
moment exhibiting themselves as a couple of 
figurantes (if I may so say) on the stage of 
Europe, and who have sacrificed their own 
happiness and dignity of mind to the very mad- 
ness I have been describing ; or, if not, to the 
far more selfish passion for notoriety and 
ostentatious display. The men I mean are 
F. Bouterwek and Frederic Schlegel, better 
7 



74 BOUTERWEK. 

known to the English public as the friend of 
Madame de Stael. The history of the first is 
somewhat ludicrous. Coming upon the stage 
at a time when Kant possessed the national mind 
of Germany, he thought it would be a good 
speculation not to fall into the train of the phi- 
losopher — but to open a sort of chapel of dis- 
sent. He saw no reason why men should not 
swear by Bouterwek, as well as by Kant; and, 
connecting this fact with the subsequent con- 
fession of Bouterwek, that he was in reality 
playing off a conscious hoax, it is laughable to 
mention, that for a time he absolutely found 
some followers — who worshipped him, but 
suspiciously and provisionally; unfortunately, 
however, as he had no leisure or ability to 
understand Kant, he was obliged to adopt Dr. 
Priestley's plan of revoking and cancelling in 
every successive work all his former works as 
false, pestilent, and heretical. This upset him. 
The philosopher was unfrocked; and in that 
line of business he found himself bankrupt. At 
this crisis things looked ill. However, being 
young, he pleaded his tender years. George 
Barnwell and others had been led astray as 



BOUTERWEK. 75 

well as himself, by keeping bad company : he 
had now quitted all connection with metaphy- 
sics ; and begged to inform the public that he 
had opened an entirely new concern for criti- 
cism in all its branches. He kept his word : 
he left off hoaxing ; and applied himself to a 
respectable line of business. The fruits of his 
labours were a history, in twelve volumes, of 
modern literature from the end of the thirteenth 
century. Of this work I have examined all 
that I pretend to judge of; viz. the two sections 
relating to the German and the English litera- 
ture; and, not to do him injustice, if it professed 
to be no more than a bibliographical record of 
books, it is executed with a very laudable care 
and fidelity. But imagine to yourself the vast 
compass of his plan. He professes to give the 
history of — 1. Spanish; 2. Portuguese; 3. 
English ; 4. German ; 5. French ; 6. Italian 
literature ; no sketch, observe, or abstract of 
them — but a full and formal history. Conceive, 
if you can, the monstrous and insane preten- 
sions involved in such a scheme. At starting 
he had five languages to learn, besides the dia- 
lects of his own ; not only so, but five Ian- 



76 SCHLEGEL. 

guages, each through all its varieties for the 
space of half a millennium : English, for in- 
stance, not merely of this day — but the English 
of Chaucer, of the Metrical Romances ; nay, 
even of Robert of Gloucester, in 1280. Next, 
the mere printed books (to say nothing of the 
MSS.) in any one of these languages, to be 
read and meditated, as they ought to be by an 
historian of the literature, would have found 
full employment for twelve able-bodied men 
through an entire life. And after all, when the 
materials were ready, the work of composition 
would be still to begin. Such were Bouterwek's 
pretensions : as to SchlegePs, who, without any 
more genius or originality, has much more 
talent ; his were still more extravagant, — and 
were pushed to an extremity that must, I should 
think, at times disquiet his admirers with a 
feeling that all is not sound. For, though he 
did not profess to go so much into detail as 
Bouterwek, still his abstracts are represented 
as built on as much reading, though not directly 
quoted ; and to all that Bouterwek held forth in 
his promises, Schlegel added, as a little bonus 
to his subscribers, 1. Oriental literature; 2. 



LITERARY PRETENSION. 77 

The Scandinavian literature ; 3. The Provencal 
literature ; and, for aught I know, a billion of 
things besides ; to say nothing of an active share 
in the current literature, as Reviewer, Maga- 
zinist, and author of all work. Now the very- 
history of these pretensions exposes their hol- 
lowness : to record them is to refute them. 
Knowing, as we all know, how many years it 
demands, and by what a leisurely and genial 
communication with their works it is, that we 
can gain any deep intimacy with even a few 
great artists, such as Shakspeare, Milton, or 
Euripides — how monstrous a fiction would that 
man force on our credulity who tells us that 
he has read and weighed in the balances the 
total products of human intellect dispersed 
through thirty languages for a period of three 
thousands years ; and how gross a delusion 
does he practise upon his own mind who can 
persuade himself that it is reading to cram him- 
self with words, the bare sense of which can 
hardly have time to glance, like the lamps of a 
mail coach, upon his hurried and bewildered 
understanding. There is a picture at Oxford, 
which I saw when a boy, of an old man with 
7* 



78 LITERARY PRETENSION. 

misery in his eye in the act of copying a book ; 
and the story attached (I forget whether with 
any historic foundation) is that he was under 
a vow to copy out some great portion of the 
Bible before he allowed himself (or was allowed) 
to eat. I dare say you know the picture; and 
perhaps I tell the story wrong. However, just 
such a man, and just so wo-begone must this 
man of words appear when he is alone in his 
study; with a frozen heart and a famished 
intellect; and every now and then, perhaps, 
exclaiming with Alcibiades, "■ Oh ye Athenians ! 
What a world of hardship I endure to obtain 
your applause." So slightly is his knowledge 
worked into the texture of his mind, that I am 
persuaded a brain fever would sweep it all 
away. With this sketch of Messrs. Bouterwek 
and Schlegel, it is superfluous to add, that 
their criticisms are utterly worthless — being all 
words — words — words : however, with this dif- 
ference, that Bouterwek's are simply =0, being 
the mere rubbishy sweepings from the works 
of literatuli long since defunct : but Schlegel's, 
agreeably to his natural haughtiness and supe- 
rior talents, are bad in a positive sense — being 



LITERARY DISPLAY. 79 

filled with such conceits, fancies, and fictions, 
as you would naturally expect from a clever 
man talking about what he had never, in any 
true sense of the word, read. (Note F.) Oh ! 
genius of English good sense, keep any child 
of mine from ever sacrificing his peace and 
intellectual health, to such a life of showy 
emptiness, of pretence, of noise, and of words : 
and even with a view to the opinion of others, 
if it were worth while sacrificing very much to 
that, teach him how far more enviable is the 
reputation of having produced even one work, 
though but in a lower department of art, and 
which has given pleasure to myriads — (such 
suppose as " The Vicar of Wakefield") — than 
to have lived in the wonderment of a gazing 
crowd, like a rope dancer or a posture master, 
with the fame of incredible attainments that 
tend to no man's pleasure, and which perish to 
the remembrance of all men as soon as their 
possessor is in his grave. 

Thus, at some risk of fatiguing you, I have 
endeavoured to sharpen your attention to the 
extreme danger which threatens a self-instructor 
in the besetting temptations to an over cultiva- 



80 COUNSEL OF MATHIAS. 

tion of languages ; temptations which, whether 
appealing to his vanity and love of ostentation 
— or to his craving for a multifarious mastery 
over books, terminate in the same evil of sub- 
stituting a barren study of words, which is, 
besides, the most lingering of all studies, for 
the healthy exercises of the intellect. All the 
great European poets, orators, and wits, are 
mentioned in a man's hearing so often, and so 
much discussion is constantly going on about 
their comparative merits, that a body of irritation 
and curiosity collects about these names, and 
unites with more legitimate feelings to persuade a 
man that it is necessary he should read them all 
— each in his own language. In a celebrated satire 
( The Pursuits of Literature) much read in my 
youth, and which I myself read about twenty- 
five years ago, I remember one counsel — there, 
addressed to young men, but, in fact, of uni- 
versal application. " I call upon them," said 
the author, " to dare to be ignorant of many 
things ;" a wise counsel, and justly expressed ; 
for it requires much courage to forsake popular 
paths of knowledge, merely upon a conviction 
that they are not favourable to the ultimate 



TEST OF A GOOD SCHEME. 81 

ends of knowledge. In you, however, that 
sort of courage may be presumed ; but how 
will you " dare to be ignorant" of many things 
in opposition to the cravings of your own mind ? 
Simply thus : destroy these false cravings by 
introducing a healthier state of the organ. 
A good scheme of study will soon show itself 
to be such by this one test — that it will ex- 
clude as powerfully as it will appropriate; 
it will be a system of repulsion no less than 
of attraction : once thoroughly possessed and 
occupied by the deep and genial pleasures 
of one truly intellectual pursuit, you will be 
easy and indifferent to all others that had pre- 
viously teased you with transient excitement : 
just as you will sometimes see a man super- 
ficially irritated as it were with wandering fits 
of liking for three or four women at once, 
which he is absurd enough to call " being in 
love :" but once profoundly in love (supposing 
him capable of being so) he never makes such 
a mistake again, all his feelings after that being 
absorbed into a sublime unity. Now, without 
anticipating this scheme of study out of its 
place, yet in general you know whether your 
intentions lean most to science or to literature. 



82 LITERATURE. 

For, upon this decision, revolve the whole mo- 
tives which can determine your choice of lan- 
guages : as, for instance, if you are in quest of 
science or philosophy, no language in Europe 
at this day (unless the Turkish) is so slenderly 
furnished as the Spanish : on the other hand, 
for literature, I am disposed to think that after 
the English none is so wealthy (I mean in 
quality, not in quantity). Here, however, to 
prevent all mistakes, let me establish one 
necessary distinction. The word literature is 
a perpetual source of confusion, because it is 
used in two senses, and those senses liable to 
be confounded with each other. In a philoso- 
phical use of the word, literature is the direct 
and adequate antithesis of books of knowledge. 
But in a popular use, it is a mere term of con- 
venience for expressing inclusively the total 
books in a language. In this latter sense, a 
dictionary, a grammar, a spelling-book, an 
almanack, a' pharmacopoeia, a parliamentary 
report, a system of farriery, a treatise on bil- 
liards, the court calendar, &c. belong to the 
literature. But in the philosophical sense, not 
only would it be ludicrous to reckon these as 



LITERATURE. 83 

parts of the literature, but even books of much 
higher pretensions must be excluded — as, for 
instance, books of voyages and travels, and 
generally all books in which the matter to be 
communicated is paramount to the manner or 
form of its communication (" ornari res ipsa 
negat, contenta doceri.") It is difficult to con- 
struct the idea of " literature" with severe 
accuracy ; for it is a fine art — the supreme 
fine art, and liable to the difficulties which 
attend such a subtle notion : in fact, a severe 
construction of the idea must be the result of 
a philosophical investigation into this subject, 
and cannot precede it. But for the sake of 
obtaining some expession for literature that 
may answer our present purpose, let us throw 
the question into another form. I have said 
that the antithesis of literature is books of 
knowledge. Now, what is that antithesis to 
knowledge, which is here implicitly latent in 
the word literature ? The vulgar antithesis is 
'pleasure : (" aut prodesse volunt, aut delec- 
tare poetse.") Books, we are told, propose to 
instruct or to amuse. Indeed ! However, not 
to spend any words upon it, I suppose you will 



84 PARADISE LOST. 

admit that this wretched antithesis will be of 
no service to us. And, by the way, let me 
remark to you, in this as in other cases, how 
men by their own errors of understanding, by 
feeble thinking, and inadequate distinctions, 
forge chains of meanness and servility for 
themselves. For this miserable alternative be- 
ing once admitted, observe what follows. In 
which class of books does the Paradise Lost 
stand 1 Among those which instruct, or those 
which amuse 1 Now, if a man answers, among 
those which instruct, — he lies : for there is no 
instruction in it, nor could be in any great 
poem, according to the meaning which the 
word must bear in this distinction, unless it is 
meant that it should involve its own antithesis. 
But if he says, " No — amongst those which 
amuse," — then what a beast must he be to 
degrade, and in this way, what has done the 
most of any human work to raise and dignify 
human nature. But the truth is, you see that 
the idiot does not wish to degrade it ; on the 
contrary, he would willingly tell a lie in its 
favour, if that would be admitted ; but such is 
the miserable state of slavery to which he has 



ANTITHESIS TO KNOWLEDGE. 85 

reduced himself by his own puny distinction ; 
for, as soon as he hops out of one of his little 
cells, he is under a necessity of hopping into 
the other. The true antithesis (Note F) to 
knowledge in this case is not pleasure, but 
power. All, that is literature, seeks to com- 
municate power ; all, that is not literature, to 
communicate knowledge. Now, if it be asked 
what is meant by communicating power, I in 
my turn would ask by what name a man 
would designate the case in which I should be 
made to feel vividly, and with a vital con- 
sciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely 
or never supplies occasions for exciting, and 
which had previously lain unawakened, and 
hardly within the dawn of consciousness — as 
myriads of modes of feeling are at this moment 
in every human mind for want of a poet to 
organize them ? — I say, when these inert and 
sleeping forms are organized — when these pos- 
sibilities are actualized, — is this conscious and 
living possession of mine poicer, or what is it ? 
When in King Lear, the height, and depth, 
and breadth of human passion is revealed to 
us — and for the purposes of a sublime anta- 
8 



86 POWER AND KNOWLEDGE. 

gonism is revealed in the weakness of an old 
man's nature, and in one night two worlds of 
storm are brought face to face — the human 
world, and the world of physical nature — mir- 
rors of each other, semichoral antiphonies, 
strophe and antistrophe heaving with rival 
convulsions, and with the double darkness of 
night and madness, when I am thus suddenly 
startled into a feeling of the infinity of the 
world within me, is this power 1 or what may 
I call it? Space, again — what is it in most 
men's minds ? The lifeless form of the world 
without us — a postulate of the geometrician, 
with no more vitality or real existence to their 
feelings, than the square root of two. But, if 
Milton has been able to inform this empty 
theatre, peopling it with Titanic shadows, 
forms that sat at the eldest counsels of the 
infant world, chaos and original night, — 

Ghostly shapes, 

To meet at noontide, Fear and trembling Hope, 

Death the Skeleton, 

And Time the Shadow 

so that, from being a thing to inscribe with 
diagrams, it has become under his hands a vital 



ANCIENT CLASSICS. 87 

agent on the human mind ; I presume that I 
may justly express the tendency of the Paradise 
Lost, by saying that it communicates power ; a 
pretension far above all communication of know- 
ledge. Henceforth, therefore, I shall use the 
antithesis power and knowledge as the most 
philosophical expression for literature (i. e. 
Literse Humaniores) and anti-literature (i. e. 
Literce didacticce — TLoudsia). 

Now then, prepared with this distinction, let 
us inquire whether — weighing the difficulties 
against the benefits — there is an overbalance 
of motive for you with your purposes to study 
what are inaccurately termed (Note G) the 
" classical" languages. And, first, with re- 
spect to Greek. We have often had the ques- 
tion debated, and, in our own days, solemn 
challenges thrown out and solemn adjudications 
given on the question whether any benefit cor- 
responding to the time and the labour can be 
derived from the study of the ancient classics. 
Hitherto, however, the question could not be 
rightly shaped : for, as no man chose to plead 
" amusement" as a sufficient motive for so 
great an undertaking, it was always debated 



88 GREEK LANGUAGE. 

with a single reference to the knowledge involved 
in those literatures. But this is a ground wholly 
untenable. For let the knowledge be what it 
might, all knowledge is translatable ; and 
translatable without one atom of loss. If this 
were all, therefore, common sense would pre- 
scribe that faithful translations should be exe- 
cuted of all the classics, and all men in future 
depend upon these vicarious labours. With 
respect to the Greek, this would soon be ac- 
complished : for what is the knowledge which 
lurks in that language ? All knowledge may 
be commodiously distributed into science and 
erudition : of the latter, (antiquities, geogra- 
phy, philology, theology, &c.) there is a very 
considerable body; of the former, but little; 
viz. the mathematical and musical works, — 
and the medical works : what else ? Nothing 
that can deserve the name of science, except 
the single organon of Aristotle. With Greek 
medicine, I suppose that you have no concern. 
As to mathematics, a man must be an idiot if he 
were to study Greek for the sake of Archimedes, 
Apollonius, or Diophantus. In Latin or in 
French, you may find them all regularly trans- 



GRECIAN LITERATURE. 89 

lated : and parts of them embodied in the works 
of English mathematicians. Besides, if it were 
otherwise, where the notions and all the rela- 
tions are so few — elementary and determinate, 
and the vocabulary therefore so scanty as in 
mathematics, it could not be necessary to learn 
Greek even if you were disposed to read the ma- 
thematicians in that language. I see no marvel 
in Halley's having translated an Arabic manu- 
script on mathematics, with no previous know- 
ledge of Arabic : on the contrary, it is a case 
(and not a very difficult case) of the art of 
deciphering, so much practised by Wallis, and 
other great mathematicians contemporary with 
Halley. But all this is an idle disputation : for 
the knowledge of whatsoever sort which lies in 
Grecian mines, wretchedly as we are furnished 
with vernacular translations, the Latin version 
will always supply. This, therefore, is not 
the ground to be taken by the advocate of 
Greek letters. It is not for knowledge that 
Greek is worth learning, but for power. Here 
arises the question — of what value is this 
power? i. e. how is the Grecian literature to 
be rated in relation to other literatures ? Now 
8* 



90 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN LITERATURE". 

is it not only because " De Carthagine satius 
est silerequam parcius dicere," but also because 
in my judgment there is no more offensive 
form of levity than the readiness to speak on 
great problems, incidentally and occasionally, — 
that I shall wholly decline this question. We 
have hitherto seen no rational criticism on 
Greek literature ; nor, indeed, to say the truth, 
much criticism which teaches any thing, or 
solves any thing, upon any literature. I shall 
simply suggest one consideration to you. The 
question is limited wholly, as you see, to the 
value of the literature in the proper sense cf 
that word. Now, it is my private theory, to 
which you will allow what degree of weight 
you please, that the Antique or pagan literature 
is a polar antagonist to the modern or Christian 
literature ; that each is an evolution from a dis- 
tinct principle, having nothing in common but 
what is necessarily common to all modes of 
thought — viz. good sense and logic ; and that 
they are to be criticised from different stations 
and points of view. This same thought has 
occurred to others ; but no great advance is 
made simply by propounding the general thesis; 



LATIN LANGUAGE. 91 

and as yet nobody has done more. (Note H.) 
It is only by the developement of this thesis 
that any real service can be performed. This 
I have myself attempted, in a series of " reve- 
ries" on that subject ; and, if you continue to 
hesitate on the question of learning Greek now 
that you know exactly how that question is 
shaped, and to what it points, my manuscript 
contains all the assistance that it is in my 
power to offer you in such a dilemma. The 
difference of the Antique from the Christian 
Literature, you must bear in mind, is not like 
that between English and Spanish literature — 
species and species — but as between genus and 
genus. The advantages therefore are — 1, the 
power, which it offers generally as a literature ; 
2, the new phasis under which it presents the 
human mind ; the Antique being the other 
hemisphere, as it were, which, with our own, 
or Christian hemisphere, composes the entire 
sphere of human intellectual energy. 

So much for the Greek. Now as to the Latin, 
the case is wholly reversed. Here the literature 
is of far less value ; and, on the whole, with your 
views, it might be doubted whether it would 



92 LATIN LANGUAGE. 

recompense your pains. But the anti-literature 
(as for want of a strict antithesis I must call it) 
is inestimable ; Latin having been the universal 
language of Christendom for so long a period. 
The Latin works since the restoration of letters, 
are alone of immense value for knowledge of 
every kind ; much science, inexhaustible eru- 
dition ; and to this day in Germany, and else- 
where on the Continent, the best part of the 
latter is communicated in Latin. Now, though 
all knowledge is (which power is not) adequate- 
ly communicable by translation, yet as there 
is no hope that the immense bibliotheca of 
Latin accumulated in the last three centuries 
ever will be translated, you cannot possibly 
dispense with this language ; and, that being 
so, it is fortunate that you have already a 
superficial acquaintance with it. The best 
means of cultivating it further, and the grounds 
of selection amongst the modem languages of 
Christendom, I will discuss fully in my next 
letter. 

Yours, most truly, 

X. Y. Z. 



LETTER IV. 

My Dear Sir, 

It is my misfortune to have been under the 
necessity too often of writing rapidly and with- 
out opportunities for after-revision. In cases 
where much composition is (Note I) demanded, 
this is a serious misfortune ; and sometimes 
irreparable, except at the price of recasting 
the whole work. But to a subject like the 
present, little of what is properly called com- 
position is applicable ; and somewhat the less 
from the indeterminate form of letters into 
which I have purposely thrown my communi- 
cations. Errors in composition apart, there 
can be no others of importance, except such 
as relate to the matter : and those are not at 
all the more incident to a man because he is 
in a hurry. Not to be too much at leisure is 
indeed often an advantage : on no occasion of 
their lives do men generally speak better than 



94 HASTE. 

on the scaffold and with the executioner at 
their side : partly indeed, because they are 
then most in earnest and unsolicitous about 
effect ; but partly also, because the pressure of 
the time sharpens and condenses the faculty 
of abstracting the capital points at issue. On 
this account, I do not plead haste as an abso- 
lute and unmitigated disadvantage. Haste pal- 
liates what haste occasions. Now there is no 
haste which can occasion oversights, as to the 
matter, to him who has meditated sufficiently 
upon his subject : all that haste can do in such 
a case, is to affect the language with respect to 
accuracy and precision : and thus far I plead 
it. I shall never plead it as shrinking from 
the severest responsibility for the thoughts and 
substance of any thing I say; but often in 
palliation of expressions careless or ill-chosen. 
And at no time can I stand more in need of 
such indulgence than at present, when I write 
both hastily and under circumstances of — but 
no matter what ; believe in general that I write 
under circumstances as unfavourable for care- 
ful selection of words as can well be imagined. 
In my last letter I declined to speak of the 



ROMAN LITERATURE. 95 

antique literature, as a subject too unwieldy and 
unmanageable for my limits. I now recur to 
it for the sake of guarding and restraining that 
particular sentence in which I have spoken of 
the Roman literature as inferior to the Greek. 
In common with all the world, I must of 
necessity think it so in the drama, and gene- 
rally in poetry xar' sfo^v. Indeed, for some 
forms of poetry, even of the lower order, it 
was the misfortune of the Roman literature 
that they were not cultivated until the era of 
fastidious taste, which in every nation takes 
place at a certain stage of society. They were 
harshly transplanted as exotics, and never 
passed through the just degrees of a natural 
growth on Roman soil. Notwithstanding this, 
the most exquisite specimens of the lighter 
lyric which the world has yet seen must be 
sought for in Horace : and very few writers of 
any country have approached to Virgil in the 
art of composition, however low we may be 
disposed at this day to rank him as a poet, 
when tried in the unequal contest with the 
sublimities of the Christian literature. The 
truth is (and this is worth being attended to) 



96 ROMAN MIND. 

that the peculiar sublimity of the Roman mind 
does not express itself, nor is it at all to be 
sought in their poetry. Poetry, according to the 
Roman ideal of it, was not an adequate organ 
for the grander movements of the national 
mind. Roman sublimity must be looked for 
in Roman acts, and in Roman sayings. 

For the acts — see their history for a thousand 
years ; the early and fabulous part not excepted, 
which, for the very reason that it is (Note J) 
fabulous, must be taken as so much the purer 
product of the Roman mind. Even the infancy 
of Rome was like the cradle of Hercules — 
glorified by splendid marvels : — " Nee licuit 
populis parvum te, Nile, videre." For their say- 
ings — for their anecdotes — their serious bon 
mots, there are none equal to the Roman in 
grandeur. " Englishman !" said a Frenchman 
once to me, " you that contest our claim to 
the sublime, and contend that < la maniere 
noble' of our artists wears a falsetto character, 
what do you think of that saying of a king of 
ours, That it became not the King of France 
to avenge the injuries of the Duke of Orleans 
(i. e. of himself under that title) ?" " Think !" 



IMPERIAL BON MOTS. 97 

said I, " Why, I think it a magnificent and 
regal speech. And such is my English ge- 
nerosity, that I heartily wish the Emperor 
Hadrian had not said the same thing fifteen 
hundred years before. (Note K.) I would 
willingly give five shillings myself to purchase 
the copyright of the saying for the French 
nation : for they want it ; and the Romans could 
spare it. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt ! 
Cursed be the name of Hadrian that stands be- 
tween France and the sublimest of bon mots !" 
Where, again, will you find a more adequate 
expression of the Roman majesty, than in the 
saying of Trajan — Imperatorem oportere stan- 
tem mori — that Csesar ought to die standing ; 
a speech of imperatorial grandeur ! Implying 
that he, who was " the foremost man of all 
this world," — and, in regard to all other nations, 
the representative of his own, should express 
its characteristic virtue in his farewell act — 
should die in iwocinctu — and should meet the 
last (Note L) enemy, as the first, with a 
Roman countenance and in a soldier's atti- 
tude. If this had an imperatorial — what fol- 
lows had a consular majesty, and is almost 
9 



98 MARIUS. 

the grandest story upon record. Marius, the 
man who rose a caligd to be seven times con- 
sul, was in a dungeon : and a slave was sent 
in with commission to put him to death. These 
were the persons, — the two extremities of ex- 
alted and forlorn humanity, its vanward and 
its rearward man, a Roman consul and an 
abject slave. But their natural relations to 
each other were by the caprice of fortune mon- 
strously inverted : the consul was in chains ; 
the slave was for a moment the arbiter of his 
fate. By what spells, what magic, did Marius 
reinstate himself in his natural prerogatives ? 
By what marvels drawn from heaven or from 
earth, did he, in the twinkling of an eye, again 
invest himself with the purple, and place be- 
tween himself and his assassin a host of sha- 
dowy lictors ? By the mere blank supremacy 
of great minds over weak ones. He fascinated 
the slave, as a rattlesnake does a bird. Standing 
" like Teneriffe," he smote him with his eye, and 
said, " Tune, homo, audes occidere C. Marium 1" 
Dost thou, fellow, presume to kill Caius Ma- 
rius ? Whereat the reptile, quaking under the 
voice, nor daring to affront the consular eye, 



GRECIAN MODELS. 99 

sank gently to the ground — turned round upon 
his hands and feet — and, crawling out of the 
prison like any other vermin, left Marius stand- 
ing in solitude as steadfast and immoveable as 
the capitol. 

In such anecdotes as these it is, in the actions 
of trying emergencies and their appropriate 
circumstances, that I find the revelation of the 
Roman mind under its highest aspect. The 
Roman mind was great in the presence of 
man, mean in the presence of nature : impotent 
to comprehend or to delineate the internal strife 
of passion (Note M), but powerful beyond any 
other national mind to display the energy of 
the icill victorious over all passion. Hence it 
is that the true Roman sublime exists no where 
in such purity as in those works which were 
not composed with a reference to Grecian mo- 
dels. On this account I wholly dissent from 
the shallow classification which expresses the 
relations of merit between the writers of the 
Augustan period, and that which followed, 
under the type of a golden and silver age. As 
artists, and with reference to composition, no 
doubt many of the writers of the latter age 



100 THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 

were rightly so classed : but an inferiority 
quoad hoc, argues no uniform and absolute 
inferiority : and the fact is, that in weight and 
grandeur of thought, the silver writers were 
much superior to the golden. Indeed, this might 
have been looked for on a priori grounds. For 
the silver writers were more truly Roman wri- 
ters from two causes : first because they trusted 
more to their own native style of thinking ; 
and looking less anxiously to Grecian arche- 
types, they wrote more naturally, feelingly, 
and originally : secondly, because the political 
circumstances of their times were advanta- 
geous, and liberated them from the suspicious 
caution which cramped the natural movements 
of a Roman mind on the first establishment of 
the monarchy. Whatever outrages of despotism 
occurred in the times of the silver writers, were 
sudden, transient, capricious, and personal in 
their origin and in their direction : but in the 
Augustan age, it was not the temper of Augus- 
tus personally, and certainly not the temper of 
the writers leading them to any excesses of 
licentious speculation, which created the dan- 
ger of bold thinking ; the danger was in the 



THE SILVER AGE. 101 

times, which were unquiet and revolutionary : 
the struggle with the republican party was yet 
too recent ; the wounds and cicatrices of the 
state too green ; the existing order of things too 
immature and critical : the triumphant party 
still viewed as a party, and for that cause still 
feeling itself a party militant. Augustus had 
that chronic complaint of a " crick in the 
neck," of which later princes are said to have 
an acute attack every 30th of January. Hence 
a servile and timid tone in the literature. The 
fiercer republicans could not be safely men- 
tioned : even Cicero it was not decorous to 
praise ; and Virgil, as perhaps you know, has 
by insinuation contrived to insult (Note N) his 
memory in the ^Eneid. But, as the irresponsi- 
ble power of the emperors grew better secured, 
their jealousy of republican sentiment abated 
much of its keenness. And, considering that 
republican freedom of thought was the very 
matrix of Roman sublimity, it ought not to 
surprise us, that as fast as the national mind 
was lightened from the pressure which weighed 

upon the natural style of its sentiment — the 
9 # 



102 THE SILVER WRITERS. 

literature should recoil into a freer movement 
with an elasticity proportioned to the intensity 
and brevity of its depression. Accordingly, in 
Seneca the philosopher, in Lucan, in Tacitus, 
even in Pliny the younger, &c., but especially 
in the two first, I affirm that there is a loftiness 
of thought more eminently and characteris- 
tically Roman than in any preceding writers : 
and in that view to rank them as writers of 
a silver age, is worthy only of those who are 
servile to the common-places of unthinking 
criticism. 

The style of thought in the silver writers, 
as a raw material, was generally more valua- 
ble than that of their predecessors ; however 
much they fell below them in the art of work- 
ing up that material. And I shall add further 
that, when I admit the vast defects of Lucan, 
for instance, as an artist, I would not be un- 
derstood as involving in that concession the 
least toleration of the vulgar doctrine, that the 
diction of the silver writers is in any respect 
below the standard of pure latinity as existing 
in the writers of the Ciceronian age. A better 
structure of latinity, I will affirm boldly, does 



MODERN LANGUAGES. 103 

not exist than that of Petronius Arbiter : and, 
taken as a body, the writers of what is deno- 
minated the silver age, are for diction no less 
Roman, and for thought much more intensely- 
Roman, than any other equal number of wri- 
ters from the preceding ages ; and, with a 
very few exceptions, are the best fitted to take 
a permanent station in the regard of men at 
your age or mine, when the meditative facul- 
ties, if they exist at all, are apt to expand — 
and to excite a craving for a greater weight of 
thought than is usually to be met with in the 
elder writers of the Roman literature. This ex- 
planation made, and having made that " amende 
honorable" to the Roman literature which my 
own gratitude demanded, — I come to the re- 
maining part of my business in this letter — 
viz. the grounds of choice amongst the lan- 
guages of modern Europe. Reserving to my 
conclusion any thing I have to say upon these 
languages ^ as depositories of literature pro- 
perly so called, I shall first speak of them as 
depositories of knoidedge. Among the four 
great races of men in Europe, viz. 1. The 
Celtic, occupying a few of the western extre- 



104 LATIN AND TEUTONIC FAMILIES. 

mities (Note O) of Europe ; 2. The Teutonic, 
occupying the northern and midland parts ; 
3. The Latin (blended with Teutonic tribes), 
occupying the south ; (Note P) and, 4. The 
Sclavonic, occupying the east (Note Q), it is 
evident that of the first and the last, it is unne- 
cessary to say any thing in this place, because 
their pretensions to literature do not extend to 
our present sense of the word. No Celt even, 
however extravagant, pretends to the posses- 
sion of a body of Celtic philosophy, and Celtic 
science of independent growth. The Celtic 
and Sclavonic languages therefore dismissed, 
our business at present is with those of the 
Latin and the Teutonic families. Now three 
of the Latin family, viz. the Italian, Spanish, 
and Portuguese, are at once excluded for the 
purpose before us : because it is notorious that, 
from political and religious causes, these three 
nations have but feebly participated in the 
general scientific and philosophic labours of 
the age. Italy, indeed, has cultivated natural 
philosophy with an exclusive zeal ; a direction 
probably impressed upon the national mind, 
by patriotic reverence for her great names in 



DANISH LITERATURE. 105 

that department. But merely for the sake of 
such knowledge (supposing no other motive) 
it would be idle to pay the price of learning 
a language ; all the current contributions to 
science being regularly gathered into the gene- 
ral garner of Europe by the scientific journals 
both at home and abroad. Of the Latin lan- 
guages, therefore, which are wholly the lan- 
guages of Catholic nations, but one — i. e. the 
French — can present any sufficient attractions 
to a student in search of general knowledge. 
Of the Teutonic literatures, on the other hand, 
which are the adequate representatives of the 
Protestant intellectual interest in Europe (no 
Catholic nations speaking a Teutonic language 
except the southern states of Germany, and 
part of the Netherlands), all give way at once 
to the paramount pretensions of the English 
and the German. I do not say this with the 
levity of ignorance — as if presuming as a mat- 
ter of course that in a small territory, such as 
Denmark, e. g. the literature must, of neces- 
sity, bear a value proportioned to its political 
rank : on the contrary, I have some acquaint- 
ance with the Danish (Note R) literature ; and 



106 SIMULTANEOUS EFFORTS. 

though, in the proper sense of the word litera- 
ture as a body of creative art, I cannot esteem 
it highly, — yet as a depository of knowledge in 
one particular direction — (viz. the direction of 
historical and antiquarian research), it has, 
undoubtedly, high claims upon the student's 
attention. But this is a direction in which a 
long- series of writers descending from a remote 
antiquity is of more importance than a great 
contemporary body : whereas, for the cultiva- 
tion of knowledge in a more comprehensive 
sense, and arrived at its present stage, large 
simultaneous efforts are of more importance 
than the longest successive efforts. Now, for 
such a purpose, it is self-evident that the means 
at the disposal of every state, must be in due 
proportion to its statistical rank. For not only 
must the scientific institutions, — the purchasers 
of books, &c. keep pace with the general pro- 
gress of the country ; but commerce alone, and 
the arts of life, which are so much benefited by 
science, naturally react upon science, in a de- 
gree proportioned to the wealth of every state 
in their demand for the aids of chemistry, 
mechanics, engineering, &c. &c. : a fact, with 



FRENCH LITERATURE. 107 

its inevitable results, to which I need scarcely 
call your attention. Moreover, waiving all 
mere presumptive arguments, the bare amount 
of books annually published in the several 
countries of Europe, puts the matter out of all 
doubt that the great commerce of thought and 
knowledge in the civilized world is at this day 
conducted in three languages — the English, the 
German, and the French. You therefore, 
having the good fortune to be an Englishman, 
are to make your choice between the two last : 
and, this being so, I conceive that there is no 
room for hesitation — the " detur pulchriori," 
being in this case (that is, remember, with an 
exclusive reference to knowledge) a direction 
easily followed. 

Dr. Johnson was accustomed to say of the 
French literature, as the kindest thing he had 
to say about it, that he valued it chiefly for this 
reason — that it had a book upon every subject. 
How far this might be a reasonable opinion 
fifty years ago, and understood, as Dr. Johnson 
must have meant it, of the French literature as 
compared with the English of the same period, 
I will not pretend to say. It has certainly 



108 GERMAN LITERATURE. 

ceased to be true even under these restrictions ; 
and is in flagrant opposition to the truth, if 
extended to the French in its relation to the 
German. Undoubtedly the French literature 
holds out to the student some peculiar advan- 
tages, as what literature does not? some even 
which we should not have anticipated; for, 
though we justly value ourselves as a nation 
upon our classical education, yet no literature 
is poorer than the English in the learning of 
classical antiquities, our Bentleys even, and 
our Porsons, having thrown all their learning 
into the channel of philology; whilst a single 
volume of the Memoirs of the French Academy 
of Inscriptions contains more useful antiquarian 
research than a whole English library. In 
digests of history again, the French language 
is richer than ours, and in their Dictionaries 
of Miscellaneous knowledge {not in their En- 
cyclopaedias). But all these are advantages 
of the French only in relation to the Eng- 
lish and not to the German literature, which, 
for vast compass, variety, and extent, far 
exceeds all others as a depository for the 
current accumulations of knowledge. The 



STATE RIVALSHIP. 109 

mere number of books published annually in 
Germany, compared with the annual product 
of France and England, is alone a satisfactory 
evidence of this assertion. With relation to 
France it is a second argument in its favour, 
that the intellectual activity of Germany is not 
intensely accumulated in one great capital as it 
is in Paris ; but whilst it is here and there con- 
verged intensely enough for all useful purposes 
(as at Berlin, Konigsberg, Leipsic, Dresden, 
Vienna, Munich, &c.) it is also healthily dif- 
fused over the whole territory. There is not a 
sixth-rate town in Protestant Germany which 
does not annually contribute its quota of books : 
intellectual culture has manured the whole soil: 
not a district but it has penetrated — 



Like Spring-, 



Which leaves no corner of the land untouch'd. 

A third advantage on the side of Germany 
(an advantage for this purpose) is its division 
into a great number of independent states : from 
this circumstance, it derives the benefit of an 
internal rivalship amongst its several members, 
over and above that general external rivalship 
10 



110 ADVANTAGE OF 

which it maintains with other nations. An 
advantage of the same kind we enjoy in Eng- 
land. The British nation is fortunately split 
into three great divisions ; and thus a national 
feeling of emulation and contest is excited — 
slight indeed, or none at all, on the part of the 
English (not from any merit, but from mere 
decay of patriotic feeling), stronger on the part 
of the Irish, and sometimes illiberally and odi- 
ously strong on the part of the Scotch (espe- 
cially as you descend — below the rank of gen- 
tlemen.) But, disgusting as it sometimes is in 
its expression, this nationality is of great service 
to our efforts in all directions : a triple power is 
gained for internal excitement of the national en- 
ergies ; whilst, in regard to any external enemy 
or any external rival, the three nations act with 
the unity of a single force. But the most con- 
spicuous advantage of the German literature is 
its great originality and boldness of speculation, 
and the character of masculine austerity and 
precision impressed upon their scientific la- 
bours, by the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolf 
heretofore, and by the severer philosophy of 
modern days. Speaking of the German litera- 



GERMAN LITERATURE. Ill 

ture at all, it would be mere affectation to say 
nothing on a subject so far-famed and so much 
misrepresented as this. Yet to summon myself 
to an effort of this kind at a moment of weari- 
ness and exhausted attention, would be the 
certain means of inflicting great weariness upon 
you. For the present, therefore, I take my 
leave, and am most truly yours, 

X. Y. Z. 



LETTER V. 

My Dear Sir, 

In my last letter, having noticed the English, 
the German, and the French, as the three 
languages in which the great commerce of 
thought and knowledge, in the civilized world, 
is at this day conducted ; and having attributed 
three very considerable advantages to the 
German as compared with the French ; I 
brought forward, in conclusion, as an advan- 
tage more conspicuous even than any I had 
before insisted on, the great originality and 
boldness of speculation which have distin- 
guished the philosophic researches of Germany 
for the last 150 years (Note T). On this 
point, as it stood opposed to some prejudices and 
gross misstatements among ourselves, I natu- 
rally declined to speak, at the close of a letter 
which had, perhaps, already exhausted your 
attention. But, as it would be mere affecta- 



THE KANTEAN PHILOSOPHY. 113 

tion wholly to evade a question, about which 
so much interest (Note U) has gathered, and 
an interest which, from its objects and grounds, 
must be so durable, I gave you reason to ex- 
pect, that I would say a few words on that 
which is at this time understood by the term 
German Philosophy — i. e. the philosophy of 
Kant. This I shall now do. But let me re- 
mind you for what purpose ; that you may 
not lay to my charge, as a fault, that limited 
notice of my subject, which the nature and 
proportions of my plan prescribe. In a short 
letter it cannot be supposed possible, if it were 
otherwise right on this occasion, that I should 
undertake an analysis of a philosophy so com- 
prehensive as to leave no track of legitimate 
interests untouched, and so profound as to pre- 
suppose many preparatory exercises of the 
understanding. What the course of my subject 
demands — is, that I should liberate the name 
and reputation of the Kantean philosophy from 
any delusion which may collect about its pur- 
poses and pretensions, through the representa- 
tions of those who have spoken of it amongst 
ourselves. The case is this : I have advised 
10* 



114 NITSCH AND WILLICH. 

you to pay a special attention to the German 
literature — as a literature of knowledge, not of 
power: and amongst other reasons for this 
advice I have alleged the high character and 
pretensions of its philosophy : but these pre- 
tensions have been met by attacks, or by 
gross misrepresentations, from all writers 
within my knowledge, who have at all noticed 
the philosophy in this country. So far as 
these have fallen in your way, they must 
naturally have indisposed you to my advice ; 
and it becomes, therefore, my business to 
point out any facts which may tend to disarm 
the authority of these writers, just so far as 
to replace you in the situation of a neutral and 
unprejudiced student. 

The persons who originally introduced the 
Kantean philosophy to the notice of the English 
public, or rather attempted to do so, were two 
Germans — Dr. Willich and (not long after) 
Dr. Nitsch. Dr. Willich, I think, has been 
gone to Hades for these last dozen years ; 
certainly his works have : and Dr. Nitsch, 
though not gone to Hades, is gone (I under- 
stand) to Germany ; which answers my pur- 



COMMENTATORS UPON KANT. 115 

pose as well ; for it is not likely that a few- 
words uttered in London will contrive to find 
out a man buried in the throng of thirty mil- 
lion Germans. Quoad hoc, therefore, Dr. 
Nitsch may be considered no less defunct than 
Dr. Willich ; and I can run no risk of wound- 
ing any body's feelings, if I should pronounce 
both doctors very eminent blockheads. It is 
difficult to say, which wrote the more absurd 
book. Willich's is a mere piece of book- 
making, and deserves no sort of attention. 
But Nitsch, who seems to have been a pains- 
taking man, has produced a work which is 
thus far worthy of mention, that it reflects as 
in a mirror one feature common to most of the 
German commentaries upon Kant's works, 
and which it is right to expose. With very 
few exceptions, these works are constructed 
upon one simple principle : finding it impossi- 
ble to obtain any glimpse of Kant's meaning 
or drift, the writers naturally asked themselves 
what was to be done ? Because a man does 
not understand one iota of his author, is he 
therefore not to comment upon him ? That 
were hard indeed ; and a sort of abstinence, 



116 HISTORIES OF PHILOSOPHY. 

which it is more easy to recommend than to 
practise. Commentaries must be written ; and, 
if not by those who understand the system 
(which would be the best plan), then (which 
is clearly the second best plan) by those who 
do not understand it. Dr. Nitsch belonged to 
this latter very respectable body, for whose 
great numerical superiority to their rivals I can 
take upon myself to vouch. Being of their 
body, the worthy doctor adopted their expe- 
dient — which is simply this : Never to deliver 
any doctrine except in the master's words ; on 
all occasions to parrot the ipsissima verba of 
Kant; and not even to venture upon the experi- 
ment of a new illustration drawn from their own 
funds. Pretty nearly upon this principle was it 
that the wretched Brucker and others have con- 
structed large histories of philosophy : having 
no comprehension of the inner meaning and 
relations of any philosophic opinion, nor sus- 
pecting to what it tended, or in what necessities 
of the intellect it had arisen — how could the 
man do more than superstitiously adhere to 
that formula of words in which it had pleased 
the philosopher to clothe it ? It was unreasona- 



NITSCH AND HIS BRETHREN. 117 

ble to expect he should: to require -of him 
that he should present it in any new aspect of 
his own devising — would have been tempting 
him into dangerous and perplexing situations : 
it would have been, in fact, a downright ag- 
gression upon his personal safety, and calling 
upon him to become felo de se ; every turn of 
a sentence might risk his breaking down : and 
no man is bound to risk his neck — credit — or 
understanding, for the benefit of another man's 
neck — credit — or understanding. " It's all 
very well," Dr. Nitsch and his brethren will 
say ; " it's all very well for you, gentlemen, 
that have no commenting to do — to understand 
your author : but to expect us to understand 
him also that have to write commentaries on 
him, for two — four — and all the way up to 
twelve volumes, 8vo. — just serves to show how 
far the unreasonableness of human nature can 
go." The doctor was determined on moral 
principles to make no compromise with such 
unreasonableness ; and, in common with all his 
brethren, set his face against understanding 
each and every chapter — paragraph — or sen- 
tence of Kant, so long as they were expected 



118 ENGLISH NOTICES 

to do duty as commentators. I treat the mat- 
ter ludicrously : but in substance I assure you 
that I do no wrong to the learned (Note V) 
commentators : and under such auspices you 
will not suppose that Kant came before the 
English public with any advantage of patro- 
nage. Between two such supporters as a 
Nitsch on the right hand, and a Willich on 
the left, I know not that philosopher that would 
escape foundering. But, fortunately for Kant, 
the supporters themselves foundered : and no 
man, that ever I met with, had seen or heard 
of their books — or seen any man that had 
seen them. It did not appear that they were, 
or logically speaking could be, forgotten : for 
no man had ever remembered them. 

The two doctors having thus broken clown 
and set off severally to Hades and Germany, 
I recollect no authors of respectability who 
have since endeavoured to attract the attention 
of the English public to the Kantean philo- 
sophy, except 1. An anonymous writer in an 
early number of the Edinburgh Review ; 2. 
Mr. Coleridge ; 3. Mr. Dugald Stewart ; 4. 
Madame de Stael, in a work published, I be- 



OF KANT. 119 

lieve, originally in this country, and during 
her residence amongst us. I do not add Sir 
William Drummond to this list, because my 
recollection of any thing he has written on the 
subject of Kant (in his Academical Ques- 
tions) is very imperfect ; nor Mr. W the 

reputed author of an article on Kant (the most 
elaborate, I am told, which at present exists in 
the English language) in the Encyclopaedia 
Londinensis ; for this essay, together with a 
few other notices of Kant in other Encyclo- 
paedias, or elsewhere, have not happened to 
fall in my way. The four writers above- 
mentioned were certainly the only ones on 
this subject who commanded sufficient in- 
fluence, either directly in their own persons — 
or (as in the first case) vicariously in the 
channel through which the author communi- 
cated with the public, considerably to affect 
the reputation of Kant in this country for 
better or worse. None of the four, except 
Mr. Coleridge, having — or professing to have 
— any direct acquaintance with the original 
works of Kant, but drawing their information 
from imbecile French books, &c. — it would 



120 EDINBURGH REVIEW. 

not be treating the other three with any in- 
justice to dismiss their opinions without notice : 
for even upon any one philosophical question, 
much more upon the fate of a great philoso- 
phical system supposed to be sub judice, it is 
as unworthy of a grave and thoughtful critic 
to rely upon the second-hand report of a 
flashy rhetorician — as it would be unbecoming 
and extra-judicial in a solemn trial to occupy 
the ear of the court with the gossip of a 
country-town. However, to omit no point of 
courtesy to any of these writers, I shall say a 
word or two upon each of them separately. 
The first and the third wrote in a spirit of 
hostility to Kant, the second and fourth as 
friends. In that order I shall take them. 
The writer of the article in the Edinburgh 
Review, I suppose upon the internal evidence 
to have been the late Dr. Thomas Brown, a 
pupil of Mr. Dugald Stewart's, and his suc- 
cessor in the Moral Philosophy chair at 
Edinburgh. This is a matter of no import- 
ance in itself; nor am I in the habit of troubling 
myself or others with literary gossip of that 
sort : but J mention it as a conjecture of my 



COINCIDENCES. 121 

own — because, if I happen to be right, it would 
be a very singular fact, that the only two 
writers within my knowledge who have so far 
forgot the philosophic character as to attempt 
an examination of a vast and elaborate system 
of philosophy not in the original — not in any 
authorized or accredited Latin version (of 
which there were two even at that time) — not 
in any version at all, but in the tawdry rhetoric 
of a Parian philosqphie a la mode, a sort of 
philosophie pour les demies, — that these two 
writers, thus remarkably agreeing in their 
readiness to forget the philosophic character, 
should also happen to have stood nearly con- 
nected in literary life. In such coincidences 
we suspect something more than a blind acci- 
dent : we suspect the natural tendency of their 
philosophy, and believe ourselves furnished 
with a measure of its power to liberate the 
mind from rashness, from caprice, and injustice, 
in such deliberate acts, which it either suggests 
or tolerates. If their own philosophic curiosity 
was satisfied with information so slender, — 
mere justice required that they should not, on 
so slight and suspicious a warrant, have 
11 



122 VILLAKS— STEWART. 

grounded any thing in disparagement of the 
philosophy or its founder. The book reviewed 
by the Edinburgh reviewer, and relied on for 
his account, of the Kantean philosophy, is the 
essay of Villars — a book so entirely childish 
that perhaps no mortification more profound 
could have fallen upon the reviewer than the 
discovery of the extent to which he had been 
duped by his author. Of this book no more 
needs to be said, than that the very terms do 
not occur in it which express the hinges of the 
system, Mr. Stewart has confided chiefly in 
Degerando — a much more sober-minded au- 
thor, of more good sense, and a greater zeal 
for truth, but, unfortunately, with no more 
ability to penetrate below the surface of the 
Kantean system. M. Degerando is represented 
as an unexceptionable evidence by Mr. Stewart, 
on the ground that he is admitted to be so by 
Kant's " countrymen." The " countrymen" 
of Kant, merely as (Note V) countrymen, can 
have no more title to an opinion upon this point, 
than a Grantham man could have a right to 
dogmatize on Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy, 
on the ground that he was a fellow-townsman 



DEGERANDO. 123 

of Sir Isaac's. The air of Konigsberg makes 
no man a philosopher, But if Mr. Stewart 
means that the competency of M. Degerando 
has been admitted by those countrymen of 
Kant's whose educations have fitted them to 
understand him, and whose writings make it 
evident that they have understood him (such 
for instance, as Reinhold, Schulze, Tieftrunk, 
Beck, Fichte, and Schelling,) then he has been 
misinformed. The mere existence of such 
works as the Histoire Comparee of M. De- 
gerando, which cannot be regarded in a higher 
light than that of verbal indices to the corpus 
philosophise, is probably unknown to them ; 
certainly, no books of that popular class are 
ever noticed by any of them, nor could rank 
higher in their eyes than an elementary school 
algebra in the eyes of a mathematician. If 
any man acknowledges Degerando's attempt 
at a popular abstract of Kant as a sound one, 
ipso facto, he degrades himself from the right 
to any opinion upon the matter. The ele- 
mentary notions of Kant, even the main pro- 
blem of his great work, are not once so much 
as alluded to by Degerando. And by the way, 



124 TRANSCENDENTAL 

if any man ever talks in your presence about 
Kant — and you suspect that he is talking with- 
out knowledge, and wish to put a stop to him, 
— I will tell you how you shall effect that end. 
Say to him as follows : — Sir, I am instructed 
by my counsel, learned in this matter, that the 
main problem of the philosophy you are talking 
of — lies involved in the term transcendental, 
and that it may be thus expressed — "An 
detur aliquid transcendentale in mente hu- 
mana :" " Is there in the human mind any 
thing which realizes the notion of transcen- 
dental (as that notion is regulated and used by 
Kant ?") Now as this makes it necessary 
above all things to master that notion in the 
fullest sense, I will thank you to explain it to 
me. And as I am further instructed that the 
answer to this question is affirmative, and is 
involved in the term synthetic unity — I will 
trouble you to make it clear to me wherein the 
difference lies between this and what is termed 
analytic unity. Thus speaking, you will in 
all probability gag him ; which is, at any rate, 
one desirable thing gained when a man insists 
on disturbing a company by disputing and 



STYLE. 125 

talking philosophy. But to return, — as there 
must always exist a strong presumption against 
philosophy of Parisian manufacture (which is 
in that department the Birmingham ware of 
Europe) ; secondly, as M. Degerando had ex- 
pressly admitted (in fact boasted) that he had 
a little trimmed and embellished the Kantean 
system, in order to fit it for the society of " les 
gens comme il fant /" and finally, as there 
were Latin versions, &c. of Kant, it must 
reasonably occur to any reader to ask why 
Mr. Stewart should not have consulted these 1 
To this question Mr. Stewart answers — that 
he could not tolerate their " barbarous" style 
and nomenclature. I must confess that in 
such an answer I see nothing worthy of a 
philosopher ; and should rather have looked 
for it from a literary petit-mattre, than from 
an emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy. 
Will a philosopher decline a useful experiment 
in physics, because it will soil his kid gloves ? 
Who thinks or cares about style in such 
studies, that is sincerely and anxiously in 
quest of truth ? (Note W.) In fact, style, in 
any proper sense, is no more a possible thing 
11* 



126 KANTEAN TERMINOLOGY. 

in such investigations as the understanding is 
summoned to by Kant — than it is in Euclid's 
Elements. As to the nomenclature again, 
supposing that it had been barbarous, who 
objects to the nomenclature of modern chemis- 
try, which is, quoad materiam, not only a 
barbarous, but a hybrid nomenclature? — 
Wherever law and intellectual order prevail, 
they debarbarize (if I may be allowed such a 
coinage) what in its elements might be bar- 
barous : the form ennobles the matter. But 
how is the Kantean terminology barbarous, 
which is chiefly composed of Grecian or Latin 
terms 1 In constructing it, Kant proceeded in 
this way : — where it was possible, he recalled 
obsolete and forgotten terms from the Platonic 
philosophy, and from the schoolmen ; or re- 
stored words abused by popular use to their 
original philosophic meaning. In other cases, 
when there happen to exist double expres- 
sions for the same notion, he called in and 
reminted them, as it were. In doing this, he 
was sometimes forestalled in part, and guided 
by the tendency of language itself. All lan- 
guages, as it has been remarked, tend to clear 



CLINAMEN. 127 

themselves of synonymes — as intellectual cul- 
ture advances ; the superfluous words being 
taken up and appropriated by new shades and 
combinations of thought evolved in the pro- 
gress of society. And long before this appro- 
priation is fixed and petrified, as it were, into 
the acknowledged vocabulary of the language, 
an insensible clinamen (to borrow a Lucretian 
word) prepares the way for it. Thus, for in- 
stance, long before Mr. Wordsworth had un- 
veiled the great philosophic distinction between 
the powers of fancy and imagination — the 
two words had begun to diverge from each 
other ; the first being used to express a faculty 
somewhat capricious (Note X) and exempted 
from law, the latter to express a faculty more 
self-determined. When, therefore, it was at 
length perceived, that under an apparent unity 
of meaning there lurked a real dualism, and 
for philosophic purposes it was necessary that 
this distinction should have its appropriate ex- 
pression, — this necessity was met half way 
by the clinamen which had already affected 
the popular usage of the words. So again, in 
the words Deist and T heist ; naturally they 



128 KANTEAN TERMINOLOGY. 

should express the same notion — the one to a 
Latin, the other to a Grecian ear. But of 
what use are such duplicates 1 It is well that 
the necessities of the understanding gradually 
reach all such cases by that insensible clina- 
men which fits them for a better purpose, than 
that of extending the mere waste fertility of 
language, viz. by taking them up into the 
service of thought. In this instance, Deist 
was used pretty generally throughout Europe, 
to express the case of him who admits a God, 
but under the fewest predicates that will satisfy 
the conditions of the understanding. A Tlieist, 
on the other hand, even in popular use, denoted 
him who admits a God with some further 
(transcendental) predicates — as, for example, 
under the relation of a moral governor to the 
world. In such cases as this, therefore, where 
Kant found himself already anticipated by the 
progress of language, he did no more than 
regulate and ordinate the evident nisus and 
tendency of the popular usage into a severe 
definition. Where, however, the notions were 
of two subtle a nature to be laid hold of by the 
popular understanding, and too little within 



TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 129 

the daily use of life to be ever affected by the 
ordinary causes which mould the course of a 
language, there he commenced and finished 
the process of separation himself. And what 
were the uses of all this ? Why the uses 
were these : first, in relation to the whole 
system of the transcendental philosophy : the 
new notions which were thus fixed and re- 
corded, were necessary to the system : they 
were useful in proportion as that was useful — 
i. e. in proportion as it was true. Secondly, 
they extended the domain of human thought, 
apart from the system and independently of it. 
A perpetual challenge or summons is held out 
to the mind in the Kantean terminology to 
clear up and regulate its own conceptions, 
which, without discipline, are apt from their 
own subtle affinities to blend and run into each 
other. The new distinctions are so many 
intellectual problems to be mastered. And, 
even without any view to a formal study of the 
transcendental philosophy, great enlargement 
would be given to the understanding, by going 
through (Note Y) a Kantean dictionary, well 
explained, and well illustrated. This termi- 



130 rant's services. 

nology therefore was useful, 1. As a means to 
an end (being part of the system) ; 2. As an 
end in itself. So much for the uses : as to 
the power of mind put forth in constructing it 
(between which and the uses lies the valuation 
of Kant's service ; for, if no uses, then we do 
not thank him for any difficulty he may have 
overcome ; if no difficulty overcome, then we 
do not ascribe as a merit to him any uses 
which may flow from it) — as to the power of 
mind put forth in constructing it, I do not 
think it likely that you will make the same 
mistake which I have heard from some unre- 
flecting persons, and which in fact lurks at the 
bottom of much that has been written against 
Kant's obscurity, as though Kant had done no 
more than impose new names. Certainly, if 
that were all, the merit would not be very con- 
spicuous. It could cost little effort of mind to 
say — let this be A, and that be D : let this 
notion be called transcendent, and that be 
called transcendental. Such a statement, 
however, supposes the ideas to be already 
known, and familiar — and simply to want 
names. In this lies the blunder. When Kant 



A COMMON ERROR. 131 

assigned the names, he created the ideas ; i. e. 
he drew them within the consciousness. In 
assigning to the complex notion X the name 
transcendental, Kant was not simply trans- 
ferring a word which had previously been used 
by the schoolmen to a more useful office ; he 
was bringing into the service of the intellect a 
new birth ; that is, drawing into a synthesis, 
which had not existed before as a synthesis, 
parts or elements which exist and come for- 
ward hourly in every man's mind. I urge 
this upon your attention, because you will 
often hear such challenges thrown out as this 
(or others involving the same error) — " Now, 
if there be any sense in this Mr. Kant's 
writings, let us have it in good old mother 
English." That is, in other words, transfer into 
the unscientific language of life, scientific no- 
tions and relations which it is not fitted to ex- 
press. The challenger proceeds upon the com- 
mon error of supposing all ideas fully developed 
to exist in esse in all understandings : ergo, in 
his own : and all that are in his own he thinks 
that we can express in English. Thus, the 
challenger, on his notions, has you in a 



132 TERMINOLOGY OF KANT. 

dilemma at any rate : for if you do not trans- 
late it, then it confirms his belief that the 
whole is jargon : if you do (as doubtless, with 
the help of much periphrasis, you may trans- 
late it into English, that will be intelligible to 
a man who already understands the philo- 
sophy), then where was the use of the new 
terminology 1 But the way to deal with this 
fellow is as follows : My good sir, I shall do 
what you ask : but, before I do it, I beg that 
you will oblige me by, 1. Translating this 
mathematics into the language of chemistry : 
2. By translating this chemistry into the lan- 
guage of mathematics : 3. Both into the lan- 
guage of cookery : and finally, solve me the 
Cambridge problem — " Given the captain's 
name, and the year of our Lord, to determine 
the longitude of the ship." This is the way 
to deal with such fellows. 

The terminology of Kant then is not a re- 
baptism of ideas already existing in the 
universal consciousness : it is, in part, an en- 
largement of the understanding by new terri- 
tory (of which I have spoken) ; and, in part, 
a better regulation of its old territory. This 



NOMENCLATURE. 133 

regulation is either negative — and consists in 
limiting more accurately the boundary line of 
conceptions that had hitherto been imperfectly 
defined ; or it is positive — and consists in the 
substitution of names which express the rela- 
tions and dependencies of the object (Note Z) 
(termini organici) for the conventional names 
which have arisen from accident, and do not 
express those relations {termini bruti). It is 
on this principle that the nomenclature of 
chemistry is constructed : substances, that were 
before known by arbitrary and non-significant 
names, are now known by systematic names, 
— i. e. such as express their relations to 
other parts of the system. In this way a 
terminology becomes in a manner organic ; 
and being itself a product of an advanced 
state of the science, is an important reagent 
for facilitating further advances. 

These are the benefits of a sound termi- 
nology : to which let me add, that no improved 
terminology can ever be invented, nay, hardly 
any plausible one, which does not presuppose 
an improved theory. Now surely benefits 
such as these ought to outweigh any offence 
12 



134 ARISTOTELIAN TERMINOLOGY. 

to the ears or the taste, if there were any. 
But the elegance of coherency is the sole 
elegance which a terminology needs to possess, 
or indeed can possess : the understanding is, 
in this case, the arbiter ; and, where that ap- 
proves, it must be a misplaced fastidiousness 
of feeling which does not submit itself to the 
presiding faculty. As an instance of a repul- 
sive terminology, I would cite that of Aristotle, 
which has something harsh and technical in it 
that prevents it from ever blending with the 
current of ordinary language ; even to this, 
however, so far as it answers its purposes, the 
mind soon learns to reconcile itself. But here, 
as in other more important points, the termi- 
nology of Kant is advantageously distinguished 
from the Aristotelian, by adapting itself with 
great ductility to any variety of structure and 
arrangement, incident to a philosophic diction. 
I have spoken so much at length on the 
subject of Kant's terminology, because this is 
likely to be the first stumbling-block to the 
student of his philosophy ; — and because it 
has been in fact the main subject of attack 
amongst those who have noticed it in this 
country ; if that can be called attack which 



DE STAEL — COLERIDGE. 135 

proceeds in acknowledged ignorance of the 
original works. 

A much more serious attack upon Kant has 
been the friendly notice of Madame de Stael. 
The sources from which she drew her opinions 
were understood to be the two Schlegels ; and, 
probably, M. Degerando. Like some country- 
men of Kant's, (e. g. Kiesewetter) she has 
contrived to translate his philosophy into a 
sense which leaves it tolerably easy to ap- 
prehend — but unfortunately at the expense of 
all definite purpose, applicability, or philo- 
sophic meaning. On the other hand, Mr. 
Coleridge, whose great philosophic powers and 
undoubted acquaintance with the works of 
Kant would have fitted him beyond any man 
to have explained them to the English student, 
has unfortunately too little talent for teaching 
or communicating any sort of knowledge — 
and apparently too little simplicity of mind, or 
zealous desire to do so. Hence it has hap- 
pened that so far from assisting Kant's pro- 
gress in this country, Mr. Coleridge must have 
retarded it by expounding the oracle in words 
of more Delphic obscurity than the German 



136 KANT MISREPRESENTED. 

original could have presented to the imma- 
turest student. It is, moreover, characteristic 
of Mr. Coleridge's mind that it never gives 
back any thing as it receives it : all things are 
modified and altered in passing through his 
thoughts : and from this cause, I believe, com- 
bined with his aversion to continuous labour, 
arises his indisposition to mathematics ; for 
that he must be content to take as he finds it. 
Now this indocility of mind greatly unfits a 
man to be the faithful expounder of a philoso- 
phic system : and it has, in fact, led Mr. Cole- 
ridge to make various misrepresentations of 
Kant : one only, as it might indispose you to 
pay any attention to Kant, I shall notice. In 
one of his works he has ascribed to Kant 
the foppery of an exoteric, and an esoteric 
doctrine : and that upon grounds wholly un- 
tenable. The direct and simple-minded Kant, 
[ am persuaded, would have been more shocked 
at this suspicion than any other with which he 
could have been loaded. 

I throw the following remarks together, as 
tending to correct some of the deepest errors 
with which men come to the examination of 



THE PURPOSE OF PHILOSOPHY. 137 

philosophic systems, whether as students or as 
critics. 

1. A good terminology will be one of the 
first results from a good theory : and hence, 
though a coherent terminology is not a suffi- 
cient evidence in favour of a system, the ab- 
sence of such a terminology is a sufficent evi- 
dence against it. 

2. It is asked which is the true philosophy ? 
But this is not the just way of putting the 
question : — the purpose of philosophy is not 
so much to accumulate positive truths in the 
first place — as to rectify the position of the 
human mind, and to correct its mode of seeing. 
The progress of the human species in this 
path is not direct but oblique : one philosophy 
does not differ from another solely by the 
amount of truth and error which it brings for- 
ward ; there is none, which has ever had much 
interest for the human mind, but will be found 
to contain some truth of importance, or some 
approximation to it : one philosophy has dif- 
fered from another rather by the station it has 
taken, and the aspect under which it has con- 
templated its object. 

12* 



138 TEST OF PHILOSOPHY. 

3. It has been objected to Kant by some 
critics in this country, that his doctines are in 
some instances reproductions only of doctrines 
brought forward by other philosophers. The 
instances alleged have been very unfortunate : 
but doubtless whatsoever truth is contained 
(according to the last remark) in the erroneous 
systems, and sometimes in the very errors 
themselves of the human mind, will be ga- 
thered up in its progress by the true system. 
Where the erroneous path has wandered in 
all directions, has returned upon itself per- 
petually, and crossed the field of inquiry with 
its mazes in every direction, — doubtless the 
path of truth will often intersect it — and per- 
haps for a short distance coincide with it : but 
that in this coincidence it receives no impulse 
or determination from that with which it coin- 
cides — will appear from the self-determining 
force which will soon carry it out of the same 
direction as inevitably as it entered it. 

4. The test of a great philosophical system 
is often falsely conceived : men fancy a cer- 
tain number of great outstanding problems of 
the highest interest to human nature, upon 



TRUE PHILOSOPHY. 139 

which every system is required to try its 
strength ; and that will be the true one, they 
think, which solves them all; and that the 
best approximation to the true one which 
solves most. But this is a most erroneous 
way of judging. True philosophy will often 
have occasion to show that these supposed 
problems are no problems at all, but mere 
impositions of the mind upon itself, arising out 
of its unrectified position — errors grounded 
upon errors. A much better test of a sound 
philosophy than the number of the pre-existing 
problems which it solves will be the quality of 
those which it proposes. By raising the sta- 
tion of the spectator it will bring a region of 
new inquiry within his view ; and the very 
faculty of comprehending these questions will 
often depend on the station from which they 
are viewed. For, as the earlier and ruder 
problems, that stimulate human curiosity, often 
turn out baseless and unreal, so again the 
higher order of problems will be incomprehen- 
sible to the undisciplined understanding. This 
is a fact which should never be lost sight of by 
those who presume upon their natural and un- 



140 ERROR CORRECTED. 

cultivated powers of mind to judge of Kant 
— Plato — or any other great philosopher. 

5. But the most general error which I have 
ever met with as a ground for unreasonable 
expectations in reference not to Kant only but 
to all original philosophers — is the persuasion 
which men have that their understandings 
contain already in full developement all the 
notions which any philosophy can demand ; 
and this not from any vanity, but from pure 
misconception. Hence they naturally think 
that all which the philosopher has to do is to 
point to the elements of the knowledge as they 
exist ready prepared, and forthwith the total 
knowledge of the one is transferred to any 
other mind. Watch the efforts of any man to 
master a new doctrine in philosophy, and you 
will find that involuntarily he addresses him- 
self to the mere dialectic labour of transposing, 
dissolving, and recombining, the notions which 
he already has. But it is not thus that any 
very important truth can be developed in the 
mind. New matter is wanted as well as new 
form. And the most important remark which 
T can suggest as a caution to those who ap- 



IMPORTANT REMARK. 141 

proach a great system of philosophy as if it 
were a series of riddles and their answers, is 
this : — no complex or very important truth 
was ever yet transferred in full developement 
from one mind to another : truth of that cha- 
racter is not a piece of furniture to be shifted ; 
it is a seed which must be sown, and pass 
through the several stages of growth. No 
doctrine of importance can be transferred in a 
matured shape into any man's understanding 
from without : it must arise by an act of ge- 
nesis within the understanding itself. 

With this remark I conclude ; and am — 
Most truly yours, 

X. Y. Z. 



NOTES. 



NOTE A. 

That this appears on the very face of his writings, 
may be inferred from a German work, published about 
two years ago, by a Hamburg barrister (I think) — 
Mr. Jacobs. The subject of the book is — the Modern 
Literature of England, with the lives, &.C., of the most 
popular authors. It is made up in a great measure 
from English literary journals ; but not always ; and 
in the particular case of the author now alluded to, 
Mr. Jacobs imputes to him not merely too lively a 
sensitiveness to censure, but absolutely a "wasser- 
scheue" (hydrophobia) with regard to reviewers and 
critics. How Mr. Jacobs came to use so strong an 
expression, or this particular expression, I cannot 
guess ; unless it were that he had happened to see 
(which however does not appear) in a work of this 
eloquent Englishman, the following picturesque sen- 
tence : — " By an unconscionable extension of the old 
adage — Noscitur a socio, my friends are never under 
the waterfall of criticism, but I must be wet through 



144 NOTES. 

with the spray." — Spray, indeed ! I wish some of us 
knew no more of these angry cataracts than their 
spray. 



NOTE B. 

Not for the sake of any exception in its favour from 
the general censure here pronounced on this body of es- 
says, but for its extraordinary tone of passion and frantic 
energy, and at times of noble sentiment, eloquently 
expressed, I must notice as by far the most memorable 
of these essays of the 17th century — that of Joachim 
Forz Ringelberg, On the Method of Study (De Ratione 
Studii). It is one of those books which have been 
written most evidently not merely by a madman (as 
many thousands have) but by a madman under a high 
paroxysm of his malady : and, omitting a few instances 
of affectation and puerility, it is highly affecting. It 
appears that the author, though not thirty years of age 
at the date of his book, was afflicted with the gravel ; 
according to his belief incurably ; and much of the 
book was actually written in darkness (on waxen 
tablets, or on wooden tablets, with a stylus formed of 
charred bones) during the sleepless nights of pain con- 
sequent upon his disease. "^Etas abiit," says he, 
11 reditura nunquam — Ah ! nunquam reditura ! Tametsi 
annum nunc solum trigesimum ago, spem tamen 



NOTES. 145 

ademit calculi morbus." And again : " Sic interim 
meditantem calculi premunt, ut gravi ipsa dolore 
mcereat mens, et plerumque noctes abducat insomnes 
angor." Towards the end it is that he states the re- 
markable circumstances under which the book was 
composed. "Bonam partem libri hujus in tenebris 
scripsi, quando somnus me ob calculi dolorem reli- 
querat ; idque quum sol adversa nobis figeret vestigia, 
nocte vagante in medio coelo. Deerat lumen ; verum 
tabulas habeo, quibus etiam in tenebris utor." It is 
singular that so interesting a book should nowhere 
have been noticed to my knowledge in English litera- 
ture, except, indeed, in a slight and inaccurate way, 
by Dr. Vicesimus Knox, in his Winter Evening Lucu- 
brations. 



NOTE C. 

Accordingly our fashionable moral practitioner for 
this generation, Dr. Paley, who prescribes for the con- 
sciences of both Universities, and indeed, of most re- 
spectable householders, has introduced a good deal of 
casuistry into his work, though not under that name. 
In England, there is an aversion to the mere name, 
founded partly on this, that casuistry has been most 
cultivated by Roman Catholic divines, and too much 
with a view to an indulgent and dispensing morality ; 
13 



146 NOTES. 

and partly on the excessive subdivision and hair-split- 
ting of cases; which tends to the infinite injury of mo- 
rals, by perplexing and tampering with the conscience, 
and by presuming morality to be above the powers 
of any but the subtlest minds. All this, however, is 
but the abuse of casuistry ; and without casuistry of 
some sort or other, no practical decision could be made 
in the accidents of daily life. Of this, on a fitter occa- 
sion, I could give a cumulative proof. Meantime, let it 
suffice to observe that law, which is the most practical 
of all things, is a perpetual casuistry ; in which an 
immemorial usage, a former decision of the court, or 
positive statute, furnishes the major proposition ; and 
the judgment of the jury, enlightened by the knowledge 
of the bench, furnishes the minor or casuistical propo- 
sition. 



NOTE D. 

Especially one, whose title I forget, by Vater, the 
editor and completer of the Mithridates, after Adelung's 
death. By the way, for the sake of the merely English 
reader, it may be well to mention that the Mithridates 
is so called, with an allusion to the great king of that 
name contemporary with Sylla, Lucullus, &c, of whom 
the tradition was that, in an immense and polyglot 
army, composed from a great variety of nations, he 
could talk to every soldier in his own language. 



147 



NOTE E. 

Sec the advertisements of the humblest schools ; in 
which, however low the price of tuition, &c, is fixed, 
French never fails to enter as a principal branch of the 
course of study. To which fact I may add, that even 
twelve or fifteen years ago I have seen French circu- 
lating libraries in London, chiefly supported by people 
in a humble rank. 



NOTE F. 

The most disengenuous instances in Schlegel of 
familiar acquaintance claimed with subjects of which 
he is necessarily ignorant — are the numerous passages 
in which he speaks of philosophers, especially of Spi- 
noza, Leibnitz, and Kant. In such cases, his sentences 
are always most artificially and jesuitically constructed, 
to give him the air of being quite at his ease on the 
one hand — and yet on the other to avoid committing 
himself by too much descent into particulars. So 
dangerous, however, is it for the ablest man to attempt 
speaking of what he does not understand, — that, as a 
sailor will detect a landsman, however expert in the 
use of nautical diction, before he has uttered two sen- 
tences, — so with all his art and finesse, and speaking 



148 NOTES. 

besides to questions of his own choosing-, yet cannot 
Schlegel escape detection in any one instance when he 
has attempted to act the philosopher. Even where the 
thing said is not otherwise objectionable, it generally 
detects itself as the remark of a novice — by addressing 
itself to something extra-essential in the philosophy, 
and which a true judge would have passed over as 
impertinent to the real business of the system. — Of 
the ludicrous blunders which inevitably arise in both 
Bouterwek and Schlegel, from hasty reading, or no 
reading at all, I noted some curious instances in my 
pocket-book ; but not having it with me, I shall men- 
tion two from memory. Bouterwek and Schlegel 
would both be highly offended, I suppose, if I were to 
doubt whether they had ever read the Paradise Lost. 
"Oh! calumny — vile calumny! We that have given 
such fine criticisms upon it — not to have read it!" 
Yes ; but there is such a case in rerum natura as that 
of criticising a work which the critic had not even 
seen. Now, that Bouterwek had not read the Paridise 
Lost, I think probable from this : — Bodmer, during 
part of the first half of the last century, as is known 
to the students of German literature, was at the head 
of a party who supported the English literature against 
the French party of the old dolt Gottsched. From 
some work of Bodmer's, Bouterwek quotes with praise 
a passage which, from being in plain German prose, 
he supposes to be Bodmer's — but which unfortunately 
happens to be a passage in the Paradise Lost, and so 
memorable a passage, that no one having once read 



NOTES. 149 

it could have failed to recognise it. So much for Bou- 
terwek : as to Schlegel, the presumption against him 
rests upon this : he is lecturing Milton in a high pro- 
fessor's style for his choice of a subject : Milton, says 
he, did not consider that the Fall of Man was but an 
inchoate action, but a part of a system, of which the 
Restoration of Man is another and equally essential 
part. The action of the Paradise Lost is, therefore, 
essentially imperfect. (Quoting from memory, and 
from a memory some years old, I do not pretend to 
give the words — but this is the sense.) Now, pace 
tanti viri, Milton did consider this ; and has provided 
for it by a magnificent expedient which a man who 
had read the Paradise Lost would have been likely to 
remember — viz. by the Vision combined with the Nar- 
rative of the Archangel, in which his final restoration 
is made known to Adam ; without which, indeed, to 
say nothing of Mr. Schlegel's objection, the poem could 
not have closed with that repose necessary as the final 
impression of any great work of art. 



NOTE G. 

For which distinction, as for most of the sound 

criticism on poetry, or any subject connected with it 

that I have ever met with, T must acknowledge my 

obligations to many years' conversation with Mr. 

13* 



150 NOTES. 

Wordsworth. Upon this occasion it may be useful 
to notice that there is a rhetorical use of the word 
" power," very different from the analytic one here in- 
troduced, which also is due originally to Mr. Words- 
worth, and will be found in no book before 1798 ; this 
is now become a regular slang term in London con- 
versation. In reference to which, it is worth notice 
that a critic, speaking of the late Mr. Shelley, a year 
or two ago, in the most popular literary journal of the 
day, said, " It is alleged that there is power in Mr. 
Shelley's poetry ; now there can be no power shown in 
poetry, except by writing good poems" (or words to 
that effect). Waiving, however, the question of Mr. 
Shelley's merits, so far is this remark from being true 
— that the word was originally introduced expressly 
to provide for the case where, though the poem was 
not good from defect in the composition, or from other 
causes, the stamina and materiel of good poetry, as 
fine thinking and passionate conceptions, could not be 
denied to exist. 



NOTE H. 

A late writer has announced it as a matter of dis- 
covery, that the term " classics" is applicable also to 
the modern languages. But surely this was never 
doubted by any man who considered the meaning and 



NOTES. 151 

origin of the term. It is drawn, as the reader must 
be reminded, from the political economy of Rome. 
Such a man was rated as to his income in the third 
class, such another in the fourth, and soon; but he 
who was in the highest was said emphatically to be of 
the class, "classicus" — a class-man, without adding 
the number, as in that case superfluous. Hence, by 
an obvious analogy, the best authors were rated as 
classici, or men of the highest class ; just as in English 
we say — " men of rank" — absolutely for men who are 
in the higest ranks of the state. The particular error, 
by which this mere formal term of relation was mate- 
riated (if I may so say) in one of its accidents (viz. 
the application to Greek and Roman writers), is one of 
the commonest and most natural. 



^NOTE I. 

Nor do I much expect, will do more ; which opinion 
1 build on the particular formula chosen for expressing 
the opposition of the antique and the Christian literature 
— viz. the classical and the romantic. This seeming to 
me to imply a total misconception of the true principle 
on which the distinction rests, I naturally look for no 
further developements of the thesis from that quarter. 



152 



NOTE J. 

" Composition." This word I use in a sense, not 
indeed peculiar to myself, but yet not very common — 
nor any where, that I know of, sufficiently developed. 
It is of the higest importance in criticism ; and there- 
fore, I shall add a note upon the true construction of 
the idea — either at the end of this letter or the next, 
according- to the space left. 



NOTE K. 

In addition to the arguments lately urged in the 
Quarterly Review, for bastardizing and degrading the 
early history of Rome, I may here mention two others, 
alleged many years ago in conversation by a friend of 
mine. 1. The immoderate length of time assigned to 
the reigns of the kings. For though it is possible that 
one king's reign may cover two entire generations (as 
that of George III.) or even two and a half (as that of 
Louis XIV.), yet it is in the highest degree improbable, 
that a series of seven kings immediately consecutive, 
should average, in the most favourable cases, more than 
24 years for each : for the proof of which, see the Col- 
lective Chronology of Ancient and Modern Europe. 2. 
The dramatic and artificial casting of the parts for 



NOTES. 153 

these kings. Each steps forward as a scenical person 
to play a distinct part or character. One makes Rome : 
another makes laws ; another makes an army ; another 
religious rites, &.c. And last of all comes a gentleman 
who " enacts the brute part" of destroying in effect 
what his predecessors had constructed ; and thus fur- 
nishes a decorous catastrophe for the whole play, and 
a magnificent birth for the republican form of govern- 
ment. 



NOTE L. 

Submonente quodam at in pristinos inimicos ani- 
madverteret, negavit se ita facturum ; adjccta civili 
voce, — Minime licere Principi Romano, ut quts privatus 
agitasset odia — ista Imperator exequi. Sparlian, in 
Had. — Vid. Histor. August. 



NOTE M. 

Neither let it be objected that it is irrational to op- 
pose what there is no chance of opposing with success- 
When the Roman Senate kept their seats immovably 
upon the entrance of the Gauls reeking from the storm 
of Rome, they did it not as supposing that this spec- 



154 



tacle of senatorial dignity could disarm the wrath of 
their savage enemy ; if they had, their act would have 
lost all its splendour. The language of their conduct 
was this : so far as the grandeur of the will is con- 
cerned, we have carried our resistance to the last ex- 
tremity, and have expressed it in the way suitable to 
our rank. For all beyond we are not answerable ; and, 
having recorded our " protest" in such an emphatic lan- 
guage, death beeomes no dishonour. The stantem mori 
expresses the same principle ; but in a symbolic act. 



NOTE N. 

So palpable is this truth, that the most unreflecting 
critics have hence been led to suspect the pretensions 
of the Atys to a Roman origin. 



NOTE O. 

Orabunt alii causas melius. JEn. VI. — an opinion 
upon the Grecian superiority in this point, which is so 
doubtful even to us in our perfect impartiality at 
this day — as a general opinion without discrimination 
of persons, that we may be sure it could not sponta- 
neously have occurred to a Roman in a burst of 
patriotic feeling, and must have been deliberately 



NOTES. 155 

manufactured to meet the malignant wishes of Augus- 
tus. More especially because, in whatever relation of 
opposition or of indifference to the principles of a 
military government, to the Parcere subjectis et debel- 
lare superbos, Virgil might view the Fine Arts of 
painting, statuary, &c, he could not but have viewed 
the Arts of forensic eloquence as standing in the 
closest alliance with that principle. 



NOTE P. 

Viz. 1. in the Cornish, Welch, Manks, Highland 
Scotch, and Irish provinces of the British empire (in 
the first and last it is true that the barbarous Celtic 
blood has been too much improved by Teutonic admix- 
ture, to allow of our considering the existing races as 
purely Celtic : this, however, does not affect the classi- 
fication of their genuine literary relics) : 2, in Biscay : 
and 3, in Basse Bretagne (Armorica) : to say nothing 
of a Celtic district said to exist in the Alps, &c. 



NOTE Q. 

Viz. Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, 
Netherlands, England, and Scotch Lowlands. 



156 



NOTE R. 
Viz. Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. 



NOTE S. 

Viz. in a zone belting' Europe from the Frozen Ocean 
through the Russian empire (including Poland) to the 
Illyrian provinces on the Adriatic. 



NOTE T. 

I take this opportunity of mentioning a curious fact 
which I ascertained about twelve years ago when 
studying the Danish. The English and Scotch phi- 
lologists have generally asserted that the Danish inva- 
sions in the ninth and tenth centuries, and their settle- 
ments in various parts of the island (as Lincolnshire, 
Cumberland, &c.) had left little or no traces of them- 
selves in the language. This opinion has been lately 
reasserted in Dr. Murray's work on the European 
languages. It is, however, inaccurate. For the re- 
markable dialect spoken amongst the lakes of Cum- 
berland and Westmoreland, together with the names of 
the mountains, tarns, &c. most of which resist all 



157 



attempts to unlock their meaning from the Anglo- 
Saxon, or any other form of the Teutonic, arc pure 
Danish — generally intelligible from the modern Danish 
of this day, but in all cases from the elder form of the 
Danish. Whenever my Opera Omnia are collected, I 
shall reprint a little memoir on this subject, which I 
inserted about four years ago in a provincial news- 
paper: or possibly before that event, for the amusement 
of the lake-tourists, Mr. Wordsworth may do me the 
favour to accept it as an appendix to his work on the 
English Lakes. 



NOTE U. 

Dating from the earliest works of Liebnitz, rather 
more. 



NOTE V. 

I have heard it alleged as a reason why no great in- 
terest in the German philosophy can exist, or can be 
created amongst the English — that there is no " de- 
mand for books on that subject :" — in which remark 
there is a singular confusion of thought. Was there 
any " demand" for the Newtonian philosophy, until the 
Newtonian philosophy appeared ? — How should there 
14 



158 



be any " demand," for books which do not exist ? But 
considering the lofty pretensions of the Kantean philo- 
sophy, it would argue a gross ignorance of human 
nature to suppose, that no interest had already attended 
the statement of these pretensions whenever they have 
been made known: and, in fact, amongst thoughtful 
and intellectual men a very deep interest has long ex- 
isted on the subject, as my own experience has been 
sufficient to convince me. Indeed what evidence could 
be alleged more strong of apathy and decay in all in- 
tellectual activity, and in all honourable direction of 
intellectual interests, than the possibility that a sys- 
tematic philosophy should arise in a great nation near 
to our own, and should claim to have settled for ever 
many of the weightiest questions, which concern the 
dignity and future progress of the human species — and 
should yet attract no attention or interest ? We may 
be assured that no nation, not thoroughly emasculated 
in power of mind — i. e. so long as any severe studies 
survive amongst her, can ever be so far degraded. But 
these judgments come of attending too much to the 
movements of what is called " the literary world :" 
literature very imperfectly represents the intellectual 
interests of any people : and literary people are in a 
large proportion as little intellectual people as any one 
meets with. 



NOTES. 159 



NOTE W. 



Under this denomination I comprehend all the rabble 
of abbreviators, abstractors, dictionary-makers, &c. &,c. 
attached to the establishment of the Kantean philosophy. 
One of the last, by the way, Schmidt, the author of a 
Kantean dictionary, may be cited as the beau ideal of 
Kantean commentators. He was altogether agreed 
with Dr. Nitsch upon the duty of not understanding- 
one's author ; and acted up to his principle through life 
— being, in fact, what the Cambridge men call a Ber- 
gen-op-zoo?n, i. e. one that sturdily defies his author — 
stands a siege of twelve or twenty years upon his un- 
derstanding — and holds out to the last impregnable to 
all assaults of reason or argument, and the heaviest 
batteries of common sense. 



NOTE X. 

The reader may suppose that this could not possibly 
have been the meaning of Mr. Stewart. But a very 
general mistake exists as to the terminology of Kant — 
as though a foreigner must find some difficulties in It 
which are removed to a native. "His own country- 
men," says a respectable literary journal, when speak- 
ing of Kant (Edinburgh Monthly Review for August, 
1820, p. 168,) — u His own countrymen find it difficult 



160 NOTES. 

to comprehend his meaning; and they dispute about* it 
to this day." Why not? The terminology of Kant 
is partly Grecian — partly scholastic ; and how should 
either become intelligible to a German, qua German, 
merely because they are fitted with German termina- 
tions and inflexions ? 



NOTE Y. 

The diction of the particular book, which had been 
recommended to Mr. Stewart's attention — viz. the 
Expositio Systematica of Phiseldek, a Danish pro- 
fessor, has all the merits which a philosophic diction 
can have, being remarkably perspicuous, precise, sim- 
ple, and unaffected. It is too much of a mere meta- 
phrase of Kant, and has too little variety of illustration : 
otherwise I do not know a better digest of the philo- 
sophy. 



NOTE Z. 

Which distinction comes out still more strongly in 
the secondary derivative fanciful, and the primary de- 
rivative fantastic : I say primary derivative — in re- 
ference to the history of the word; — 1, qnvrcto-ix, 



NOTES. 161 

whence phantasy : — 2, for metrical purposes, phanfsy 
(as it is usually spelt in Sylvester's Du Bartas, and other 
scholarlike poems of that day :) — 3, by dropping the t 
in pronunciation; phansy or fancy. Now from No. 1, 
comes fantastic ; from No. 3, comes fanciful. 



NOTE AA. 

In some cases it is true that the construction of the 
ideas is posterior to the system, and presupposes a 
knowledge of it rather than precedes it ; but this is 
not generally true. 



NOTE BB. 

In a conversation which I once had with the late 
Bishop of LlandafF, on the subject of Kant, he ob- 
jccted chiefly to the terminology, and assigned, as one 
instance of what seemed to him needless innovations, 
the word apperception. " If this word means self- 
consciousness," said he, " I do not see why Mr. Kant 
might not have contented himself with what contented 
his father." But the truth is, that this word exactly 
illustrates the explanation made above : it expresses one 
fact in a system sub ratione, and with a retrospect to 



162 NOTES. 

another. This would have been the apology for the 
word : however, in this particular instance, I chose 
rather to apologize for Kant, by alleging that Wolf 
and Leibnitz had used the word ; so that it was an 
established word before the birth of the transcendental 
philosophy ; and it might therefore be doubted, whether 
Mr. Kant, senior, had contented himself in this case 
with less than Mr. Kant, j unior. 



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Oratores Attici et quos sic vocant Sophistae opera et 
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